Democracy Now! - Domestic Violencehttp://www.democracynow.org/topics/domestic_violence
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144144Democracy Now! - Domestic Violenceen-USDemocracy Now! - Domestic ViolenceDave Zirin on NFL Season's Lowlights: Domestic Abuse, Concussions and Seahawks' Super Bowl Screw-Uphttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/2/dave_zirin_on_the_super_bowl
tag:democracynow.org,2015-02-02:en/story/91d12a AMY GOODMAN : We turn to the biggest football game and the biggest television event of the year: the Super Bowl. On Sunday, the New England Patriots scored a dramatic 28-24 comeback victory over the Seattle Seahawks. An estimated 113 million Americans were expected to tune in to the game, making it among the most watched Super Bowls in history. Advertisers spent around $150,000 per second of air time—about $4.5 million for a 30-second commercial. Last season, the National Football League, or NFL , earned at least $1 billion in profits.
The Super Bowl comes as the NFL is embroiled in a number of controversies, including its poor handling of domestic violence cases. More than half of the players who have been accused of domestic violence during Roger Goodell&#8217;s tenure as NFL commissioner have gone without punishment from the league. During Sunday&#8217;s game, the NFL teamed up with the No More campaign to run an anti-domestic violence PSA . It features an abused woman dialing 911. She&#8217;s ostensibly trying to order a pizza, but the police dispatcher listens carefully and realizes the woman is actually speaking in code because her abuser is in the room with her. During the call, startling images of the inside of a wrecked home are shown. Let&#8217;s go to the PSA .
911 OPERATOR : 911 operator, 911, where&#8217;s the emergency?
CALLER : 127 Bremier.
911 OPERATOR : OK, what&#8217;s going on there?
CALLER : I&#8217;d like to order a pizza for delivery.
911 OPERATOR : Ma&#8217;am, you&#8217;ve reached 911. This is an emergency line.
CALLER : Yeah, a large with half pepperoni, half mushroom.
911 OPERATOR : You know you called 911. This is an emergency line.
CALLER : Yeah, but do you know how long it will be?
911 OPERATOR : OK, Ma&#8217;am, is everything OK over there? Do you have an emergency or not?
CALLER : Yes.
911 OPERATOR : And you&#8217;re unable to talk because?
CALLER : Right, right.
911 OPERATOR : OK, is someone in the room with you? Just say yes or no.
CALLER : Yes.
911 OPERATOR : OK, it looks like I have an officer about a mile from your location. Are there any weapons in your house?
CALLER : No.
911 OPERATOR : Can you stay on the phone with me?
CALLER : No. See you soon. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : The PSA ends with the words across the screen: &quot;When It&#8217;s hard to talk, it&#8217;s up to us to listen.&quot; The PSA was based on a true 911 call taken by a dispatcher named Keith Weisinger.
Meanwhile, the NFL is also under fire for its handling of player safety, and concussions, in particular. While fans still turn out for the Super Bowl in record numbers, four in 10 parents now say they would think twice about letting their own child play football.
The NFL is also dealing with a scandal over the alleged under-inflating of footballs used by the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. Journalists have raised questions about the league&#8217;s handling of the scandal known as &quot;Deflategate.&quot;
Well, for more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we&#8217;re joined by none other than sports journalist Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. He&#8217;s also host of a Pacifica Radio show with Etan Thomas called The Collision , where sports collide with politics.
Dave, welcome back to Democracy Now! But before we go to the issues I just addressed, let&#8217;s go to those last seconds of the game: With less than a yard, why didn&#8217;t the Seahawks give the ball to Marshawn Lynch? Can you explain who he is, for people who don&#8217;t watch sports—
DAVE ZIRIN : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —and why this matters, why we&#8217;re talking, actually, sports right now?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yeah, I&#8217;m very aware that maybe a lot of Democracy Now! listeners chose to join the two-thirds of Americans who did not watch the Super Bowl last night, but this will probably be discussed around your water cooler today. The Seattle Seahawks were down four points, from the one yard line, with under 30 seconds to go. It was second down. And they had one of the most punishing running backs in the history of the National Football League, Marshawn Lynch, ready to give the ball to score the winning touchdown. It seemed like it was already written. People were already celebrating on the sidelines. The tweets were already flying fast and furious that the Seahawks were going to win the Super Bowl. Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady&#8217;s head was already in his hands. But unexplicably—inexplicably, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson, was told to throw a crossing pattern across the middle of the field from the one yard line—a play that, honestly, is never called in any game under any situation. The Patriots picked the ball off, and the game was over.
And already, you are seeing a rebellion in the Seahawks locker room—in the very authoritarian structure of the National Football League, this is very rare—questioning why the coaches made that call, questioning why Marshawn Lynch was not handed the ball, and even asking much more pointed, conspiratorial and political questions about whether there was some kind of vested interest on the Seattle Seahawks sideline in making the clean-cut Russell Wilson the hero of that game, instead of the more rough-and-tumble Marshawn Lynch.
AMY GOODMAN : So, talk more about why you think that happened.
DAVE ZIRIN : Well, first of all, let me say that this is not my conspiracy theory I&#8217;m pulling out of whole cloth. A player said it off the record to Mike Silver from the NFL .com, and I spoke to somebody who was inside that locker room. And granted, they were in a state of shock, but all they kept saying over and over was, &quot;They didn&#8217;t want Marshawn to be the hero. They didn&#8217;t want Marshawn to be the hero.&quot; And without judging the veracity of this theory, it is worth explaining why.
Russell Wilson is very young. He&#8217;s very clean-cut. He&#8217;s 26 years old. He&#8217;s about to get a new contract. Him being the face of this billion-dollar entity that is the Seattle Seahawks going forward is something that the people of the NFL would absolutely love.
Marshawn Lynch is going to be 29 years old this summer. That&#8217;s actually quite old for a running back. And he&#8217;s also due a new contract. If you haven&#8217;t paid attention over the last two weeks, you might not know this, but Marshawn Lynch is very, very interesting and rebellious. The best way to put it, like labor journalist Sarah Jaffe put it, is that Marshawn Lynch is someone who believes in seizing control of his own labor, meaning he won&#8217;t talk to reporters even though it&#8217;s in his contract to talk to reporters, meaning he refuses to do anything that the NFL wants him to do. As one teammate said, he refuses to dance. Instead, he is himself. He is Marshawn Lynch. And so, he just says, over and over again, &quot;I&#8217;m just talking so I won&#8217;t get fined.&quot; And he said that 29 times at the Super Bowl Media Day. &quot;I&#8217;m just talking so I won&#8217;t get fined.&quot; Saul Williams, the great poet, he described that as poetry: &quot;I&#8217;m just talking so I won&#8217;t get fined.&quot; He said, &quot;Marshawn Lynch is a poet.&quot; And there&#8217;s a way in which that connected with a lot of people who don&#8217;t like being told what to do by authoritarian, top-down corporate structures.
So Lynch became somewhat of a folk hero, and also somewhat of a bête noire for the people in the higher offices of the National Football League. So hence the theory goes, &quot;OK, we&#8217;re going to win this game anyway. Who&#8217;s going to be the person who says, &#8217;I&#8217;m going to Disney World!&#8217; and gets to be the big star at the end of the day? Let it be Russell Wilson,&quot; who&#8217;s kind of like Derek Jeter 2.0. &quot;Don&#8217;t let it be Marshawn Lynch.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to the issue of domestic violence. Miko Grimes, the wife of Dolphins cornerback Brent Grimes, took to the Twitter—took to Twitter last week to excoriate the NFL . In a series of fiery tweets, she said, quote, &quot;The NFL is the [bleep]iest, SHADIEST , DISRESPECTFUL professional sport in the WORLD and as long as i breathe air, I will talk [bleep] about em!&quot; and &quot;I have friends that were beaten, thrown down stairs WHILE PREGNANT , guys arrested, &amp; the NFL suspended them ONE [bleep]ing GAME ! Now yall care?&quot; she wrote. So, talk about what she said, and also talk about the PSA that went out to this 100 or so million people who were watching the Super Bowl last night, Dave.
DAVE ZIRIN : No, absolutely. I mean, the argument that Miko Grimes is expressing is one I have certainly heard from a lot of people who are connected to the NFL , from NFL families, and from people who work on the issue of domestic violence and intimate partner violence who are trying to partner with the National Football League, that it&#8217;s all optics, it&#8217;s all public relations, that the National Football League has spent decades covering up issues of domestic violence, and that if Ray Rice had not been caught on videotape punching his then fiancée Janay Palmer, that would have been just another time when it was brushed under the carpet. Yet it went viral, and the NFL has had to respond by doing these kinds of PSAs.
Now, maybe these PSAs will do some good. As we know, raising awareness does have its benefits on this issue. It cuts against the shame that too often accompanies issues of intimate partner violence. Yet, at the same time, the folks who actually do the work are very concerned that the National Football League is far more concerned with the public relations of this, and far too concerned with operating as a model of punitive measures, to actually punish players, suspend players, expel players from the league who are caught in acting in domestic violence, and aren&#8217;t trying to reach out to families. And the fear is that if you are an NFL wife or girlfriend or child who&#8217;s in this situation, you would be less likely to come forward if you think that the entire financial future of your family would be imperiled.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to the president of the National Organization for Women, Terry O&#8217;Neill, who has called the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell—she has called on him to resign.
DAVE ZIRIN : Mm-hmm, she&#8217;s absolutely correct. Yeah, oh, yes—
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s—I want to go to Terry O&#8217;Neill.
DAVE ZIRIN : Yes, yes.
TERRY O&#8217;NEILL: Roger Goodell has done some things right. He reached out to the National Network to End Domestic Violence. He established a new policy. The policy is not perfect, but it&#8217;s a step in the right direction. But the problem is he is continuing to treat this as an image problem. He&#8217;s trying to diminish it, deflect, evade, that it&#8217;s just about Ray Rice. We believe that it is really not just about Ray Rice. Roger Goodell cannot credibly commit to making the kinds of changes throughout the organization that we believe need to be made, and that&#8217;s why we think he needs to go.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Terry O&#8217;Neill. You, too, Dave Zirin, have called for Roger Goodell to go. Talk about her views and your views.
DAVE ZIRIN : Well, she&#8217;s absolutely right, because there&#8217;s a legal term, &quot;fruit from a poison tree,&quot; and that&#8217;s who Roger Goodell is at this point. He&#8217;s a poison tree. So no matter what he does, given the fact that the first 55 players who were accused of domestic violence under his tenure, Roger Goodell effectively just sat on his hands, everything is going to look shady this way forward. You need to have a new commissioner who&#8217;s actually willing to work with the Players Association to figure out how to have a sensible policy on this issue, how to do something that doesn&#8217;t just show the league cares, but actually does care and actually is trying to do something to reach out to families. Roger Goodell is just not seen as an honest broker.
And you saw this in his press conference, where—that he did before the Super Bowl. Frank Luntz, the Republican spinmeister, the person who tried to teach us all that global warming was really just suntan day, just if you rebrand things, everything will be fine—Frank Luntz was there in the press conference, practically mouthing words to Roger Goodell as he said the word &quot;integrity&quot; like 21 times and didn&#8217;t use the phrase &quot;domestic violence&quot; until 21 minutes in. And then, the one time the mask slipped was when he threw some serious shade on CNN reporter Rachel Nichols, one of the few women to even be able to ask him a question in this press conference, when she asked him about the conflict of interest around the fact that the NFL is basically hiring its own independent investigators. That&#8217;s the problem. And then you see Roger Goodell snap at Rachel Nichols, you see Frank Luntz in the room, and all you can think is: How sincere really is this?
AMY GOODMAN : For years, the NFL has disputed evidence, moving on to another issue, that its players suffer a high rate of severe brain damage. However, according to a September article in The New York Times , the league stated in federal court documents it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems. The statement is the league&#8217;s most candid admission yet that the sport&#8217;s participants sustain traumatic brain injuries at a far higher rate than the general population. Last week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell praised the league for its recent efforts to protect its players.
ROGER GOODELL : We are doing more to protect our players from unnecessary risk. Hits to defenseless players this season were down 68 percent. And there were similar decreases in other areas pertaining to the safety of the game. We reported yesterday that concussions were down 25 percent this past regular season, continuing a three-year trend. And we are establishing the position of a chief medical officer. This individual, who we expect to have in place very soon, will oversee our medical-related policies.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Dave Zirin, that&#8217;s Roger Goodell.
DAVE ZIRIN : Wow.
AMY GOODMAN : You tweeted, doctors told the Patriots during the Super Bowl last night that their wide receiver should be checked for concussion, but he stayed in the game?
DAVE ZIRIN : Not only did he stay in the game, Julian Edelman, but he caught the winning touchdown in the game, which is just going to be more incentive to cover these things up.
Look, those percentages that Roger Goodell just put forward, those numbers are more massaged than the police numbers on the TV show The Wire . They are put forward as a way to say the NFL is doing something about these kinds of injuries. Yet we still have a commissioner in Roger Goodell who took the ALS ice bucket challenge while still denying publicly that there&#8217;s any connection between head injuries and ALS . That&#8217;s the sort of person we&#8217;re dealing with here. That&#8217;s the fruit from a poison tree. And that&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t believe anything—and no one, frankly, should believe anything—that&#8217;s coming out of his mouth about the game being any safer. Football is like smoking. And if you want to smoke, that&#8217;s your freedom, that&#8217;s your business. But do not kid yourself to think that just because you&#8217;re smoking an American Spirit and not an unfiltered Camel, that it&#8217;s somehow healthier for you.
AMY GOODMAN : Dave Zirin, thanks so much for being with us, sports editor at The Nation , host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM, also with Etan Thomas does a Pacifica Radio show on WPFW , The Collision . AMYGOODMAN: We turn to the biggest football game and the biggest television event of the year: the Super Bowl. On Sunday, the New England Patriots scored a dramatic 28-24 comeback victory over the Seattle Seahawks. An estimated 113 million Americans were expected to tune in to the game, making it among the most watched Super Bowls in history. Advertisers spent around $150,000 per second of air time—about $4.5 million for a 30-second commercial. Last season, the National Football League, or NFL, earned at least $1 billion in profits.

The Super Bowl comes as the NFL is embroiled in a number of controversies, including its poor handling of domestic violence cases. More than half of the players who have been accused of domestic violence during Roger Goodell’s tenure as NFL commissioner have gone without punishment from the league. During Sunday’s game, the NFL teamed up with the No More campaign to run an anti-domestic violence PSA. It features an abused woman dialing 911. She’s ostensibly trying to order a pizza, but the police dispatcher listens carefully and realizes the woman is actually speaking in code because her abuser is in the room with her. During the call, startling images of the inside of a wrecked home are shown. Let’s go to the PSA.

911 OPERATOR: 911 operator, 911, where’s the emergency?

CALLER: 127 Bremier.

911 OPERATOR: OK, what’s going on there?

CALLER: I’d like to order a pizza for delivery.

911 OPERATOR: Ma’am, you’ve reached 911. This is an emergency line.

CALLER: Yeah, a large with half pepperoni, half mushroom.

911 OPERATOR: You know you called 911. This is an emergency line.

CALLER: Yeah, but do you know how long it will be?

911 OPERATOR: OK, Ma’am, is everything OK over there? Do you have an emergency or not?

CALLER: Yes.

911 OPERATOR: And you’re unable to talk because?

CALLER: Right, right.

911 OPERATOR: OK, is someone in the room with you? Just say yes or no.

CALLER: Yes.

911 OPERATOR: OK, it looks like I have an officer about a mile from your location. Are there any weapons in your house?

CALLER: No.

911 OPERATOR: Can you stay on the phone with me?

CALLER: No. See you soon. Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: The PSA ends with the words across the screen: "When It’s hard to talk, it’s up to us to listen." The PSA was based on a true 911 call taken by a dispatcher named Keith Weisinger.

Meanwhile, the NFL is also under fire for its handling of player safety, and concussions, in particular. While fans still turn out for the Super Bowl in record numbers, four in 10 parents now say they would think twice about letting their own child play football.

The NFL is also dealing with a scandal over the alleged under-inflating of footballs used by the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. Journalists have raised questions about the league’s handling of the scandal known as "Deflategate."

Well, for more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by none other than sports journalist Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. He’s also host of a Pacifica Radio show with Etan Thomas called The Collision, where sports collide with politics.

Dave, welcome back to Democracy Now! But before we go to the issues I just addressed, let’s go to those last seconds of the game: With less than a yard, why didn’t the Seahawks give the ball to Marshawn Lynch? Can you explain who he is, for people who don’t watch sports—

DAVEZIRIN: Yeah, I’m very aware that maybe a lot of Democracy Now! listeners chose to join the two-thirds of Americans who did not watch the Super Bowl last night, but this will probably be discussed around your water cooler today. The Seattle Seahawks were down four points, from the one yard line, with under 30 seconds to go. It was second down. And they had one of the most punishing running backs in the history of the National Football League, Marshawn Lynch, ready to give the ball to score the winning touchdown. It seemed like it was already written. People were already celebrating on the sidelines. The tweets were already flying fast and furious that the Seahawks were going to win the Super Bowl. Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady’s head was already in his hands. But unexplicably—inexplicably, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson, was told to throw a crossing pattern across the middle of the field from the one yard line—a play that, honestly, is never called in any game under any situation. The Patriots picked the ball off, and the game was over.

And already, you are seeing a rebellion in the Seahawks locker room—in the very authoritarian structure of the National Football League, this is very rare—questioning why the coaches made that call, questioning why Marshawn Lynch was not handed the ball, and even asking much more pointed, conspiratorial and political questions about whether there was some kind of vested interest on the Seattle Seahawks sideline in making the clean-cut Russell Wilson the hero of that game, instead of the more rough-and-tumble Marshawn Lynch.

AMYGOODMAN: So, talk more about why you think that happened.

DAVEZIRIN: Well, first of all, let me say that this is not my conspiracy theory I’m pulling out of whole cloth. A player said it off the record to Mike Silver from the NFL.com, and I spoke to somebody who was inside that locker room. And granted, they were in a state of shock, but all they kept saying over and over was, "They didn’t want Marshawn to be the hero. They didn’t want Marshawn to be the hero." And without judging the veracity of this theory, it is worth explaining why.

Russell Wilson is very young. He’s very clean-cut. He’s 26 years old. He’s about to get a new contract. Him being the face of this billion-dollar entity that is the Seattle Seahawks going forward is something that the people of the NFL would absolutely love.

Marshawn Lynch is going to be 29 years old this summer. That’s actually quite old for a running back. And he’s also due a new contract. If you haven’t paid attention over the last two weeks, you might not know this, but Marshawn Lynch is very, very interesting and rebellious. The best way to put it, like labor journalist Sarah Jaffe put it, is that Marshawn Lynch is someone who believes in seizing control of his own labor, meaning he won’t talk to reporters even though it’s in his contract to talk to reporters, meaning he refuses to do anything that the NFL wants him to do. As one teammate said, he refuses to dance. Instead, he is himself. He is Marshawn Lynch. And so, he just says, over and over again, "I’m just talking so I won’t get fined." And he said that 29 times at the Super Bowl Media Day. "I’m just talking so I won’t get fined." Saul Williams, the great poet, he described that as poetry: "I’m just talking so I won’t get fined." He said, "Marshawn Lynch is a poet." And there’s a way in which that connected with a lot of people who don’t like being told what to do by authoritarian, top-down corporate structures.

So Lynch became somewhat of a folk hero, and also somewhat of a bête noire for the people in the higher offices of the National Football League. So hence the theory goes, "OK, we’re going to win this game anyway. Who’s going to be the person who says, ’I’m going to Disney World!’ and gets to be the big star at the end of the day? Let it be Russell Wilson," who’s kind of like Derek Jeter 2.0. "Don’t let it be Marshawn Lynch."

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to the issue of domestic violence. Miko Grimes, the wife of Dolphins cornerback Brent Grimes, took to the Twitter—took to Twitter last week to excoriate the NFL. In a series of fiery tweets, she said, quote, "The NFL is the [bleep]iest, SHADIEST, DISRESPECTFUL professional sport in the WORLD and as long as i breathe air, I will talk [bleep] about em!" and "I have friends that were beaten, thrown down stairs WHILEPREGNANT, guys arrested, & the NFL suspended them ONE [bleep]ing GAME! Now yall care?" she wrote. So, talk about what she said, and also talk about the PSA that went out to this 100 or so million people who were watching the Super Bowl last night, Dave.

DAVEZIRIN: No, absolutely. I mean, the argument that Miko Grimes is expressing is one I have certainly heard from a lot of people who are connected to the NFL, from NFL families, and from people who work on the issue of domestic violence and intimate partner violence who are trying to partner with the National Football League, that it’s all optics, it’s all public relations, that the National Football League has spent decades covering up issues of domestic violence, and that if Ray Rice had not been caught on videotape punching his then fiancée Janay Palmer, that would have been just another time when it was brushed under the carpet. Yet it went viral, and the NFL has had to respond by doing these kinds of PSAs.

Now, maybe these PSAs will do some good. As we know, raising awareness does have its benefits on this issue. It cuts against the shame that too often accompanies issues of intimate partner violence. Yet, at the same time, the folks who actually do the work are very concerned that the National Football League is far more concerned with the public relations of this, and far too concerned with operating as a model of punitive measures, to actually punish players, suspend players, expel players from the league who are caught in acting in domestic violence, and aren’t trying to reach out to families. And the fear is that if you are an NFL wife or girlfriend or child who’s in this situation, you would be less likely to come forward if you think that the entire financial future of your family would be imperiled.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to the president of the National Organization for Women, Terry O’Neill, who has called the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell—she has called on him to resign.

DAVEZIRIN: Mm-hmm, she’s absolutely correct. Yeah, oh, yes—

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s—I want to go to Terry O’Neill.

DAVEZIRIN: Yes, yes.

TERRY O’NEILL: Roger Goodell has done some things right. He reached out to the National Network to End Domestic Violence. He established a new policy. The policy is not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. But the problem is he is continuing to treat this as an image problem. He’s trying to diminish it, deflect, evade, that it’s just about Ray Rice. We believe that it is really not just about Ray Rice. Roger Goodell cannot credibly commit to making the kinds of changes throughout the organization that we believe need to be made, and that’s why we think he needs to go.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Terry O’Neill. You, too, Dave Zirin, have called for Roger Goodell to go. Talk about her views and your views.

DAVEZIRIN: Well, she’s absolutely right, because there’s a legal term, "fruit from a poison tree," and that’s who Roger Goodell is at this point. He’s a poison tree. So no matter what he does, given the fact that the first 55 players who were accused of domestic violence under his tenure, Roger Goodell effectively just sat on his hands, everything is going to look shady this way forward. You need to have a new commissioner who’s actually willing to work with the Players Association to figure out how to have a sensible policy on this issue, how to do something that doesn’t just show the league cares, but actually does care and actually is trying to do something to reach out to families. Roger Goodell is just not seen as an honest broker.

And you saw this in his press conference, where—that he did before the Super Bowl. Frank Luntz, the Republican spinmeister, the person who tried to teach us all that global warming was really just suntan day, just if you rebrand things, everything will be fine—Frank Luntz was there in the press conference, practically mouthing words to Roger Goodell as he said the word "integrity" like 21 times and didn’t use the phrase "domestic violence" until 21 minutes in. And then, the one time the mask slipped was when he threw some serious shade on CNN reporter Rachel Nichols, one of the few women to even be able to ask him a question in this press conference, when she asked him about the conflict of interest around the fact that the NFL is basically hiring its own independent investigators. That’s the problem. And then you see Roger Goodell snap at Rachel Nichols, you see Frank Luntz in the room, and all you can think is: How sincere really is this?

AMYGOODMAN: For years, the NFL has disputed evidence, moving on to another issue, that its players suffer a high rate of severe brain damage. However, according to a September article in The New York Times, the league stated in federal court documents it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems. The statement is the league’s most candid admission yet that the sport’s participants sustain traumatic brain injuries at a far higher rate than the general population. Last week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell praised the league for its recent efforts to protect its players.

ROGERGOODELL: We are doing more to protect our players from unnecessary risk. Hits to defenseless players this season were down 68 percent. And there were similar decreases in other areas pertaining to the safety of the game. We reported yesterday that concussions were down 25 percent this past regular season, continuing a three-year trend. And we are establishing the position of a chief medical officer. This individual, who we expect to have in place very soon, will oversee our medical-related policies.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Dave Zirin, that’s Roger Goodell.

DAVEZIRIN: Wow.

AMYGOODMAN: You tweeted, doctors told the Patriots during the Super Bowl last night that their wide receiver should be checked for concussion, but he stayed in the game?

DAVEZIRIN: Not only did he stay in the game, Julian Edelman, but he caught the winning touchdown in the game, which is just going to be more incentive to cover these things up.

Look, those percentages that Roger Goodell just put forward, those numbers are more massaged than the police numbers on the TV show The Wire. They are put forward as a way to say the NFL is doing something about these kinds of injuries. Yet we still have a commissioner in Roger Goodell who took the ALS ice bucket challenge while still denying publicly that there’s any connection between head injuries and ALS. That’s the sort of person we’re dealing with here. That’s the fruit from a poison tree. And that’s why I don’t believe anything—and no one, frankly, should believe anything—that’s coming out of his mouth about the game being any safer. Football is like smoking. And if you want to smoke, that’s your freedom, that’s your business. But do not kid yourself to think that just because you’re smoking an American Spirit and not an unfiltered Camel, that it’s somehow healthier for you.

AMYGOODMAN: Dave Zirin, thanks so much for being with us, sports editor at The Nation, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM, also with Etan Thomas does a Pacifica Radio show on WPFW, The Collision.

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Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500It's Not Just Ray Rice: Dave Zirin on the NFL's History of Condoning Domestic Abusehttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/9/its_not_just_ray_rice_dave
tag:democracynow.org,2014-09-09:en/story/3a44b2 AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the sporting news that has put a new spotlight on domestic violence and its lax treatment by the country&#8217;s most popular sport. The National Football League has indefinitely suspended star running back Ray Rice over a video showing him punching his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, leaving her unconscious. The video, from February, was released Monday by the tabloid website TMZ . And a warning as we show it to our television audience, it is graphic.
On the tape, Rice and Janay Palmer are seen arguing in the elevator of a casino. As Palmer lunges toward Rice, he strikes her in the face, and she falls back and slams her head against the elevator wall. Rice then drags her from the elevator as she lays motionless.
In addition to his league suspension, Rice has also been cut by his football team, the Baltimore Ravens. That&#8217;s a reversal from just weeks ago, when head coach [John] Harbaugh stood by Rice and praised his handling of the fallout. On Monday, Harbaugh said the new video changed the team&#8217;s perception of the incident.
JOHN HARBAUGH : You know, it&#8217;s something we saw for the first time today, you know, all of us. And it changed things, of course. You know, it made things a little bit different.
AMY GOODMAN : But Harbaugh&#8217;s explanation may not satisfy critics, who say the Ravens and the league mishandled Rice&#8217;s assault from the start. The details in this case have been known for months. Video from a different camera angle had previously been released of Rice dragging Palmer out of the elevator and dropping her face-first onto the ground, unconscious. The tape released Monday was previously known to exist, but the NFL&#8217;s first response in July was to suspend Rice for just two games. That sparked a massive public outcry that led NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to apologize and change the league&#8217;s domestic violence policy. The Ravens now say they&#8217;ve suspended Rice because he was dishonest with them about the incident.
And despite reports to the contrary, the NFL now claims it never saw the new video, saying law enforcement did not make it available. That in turn raises questions for New Jersey prosecutors. Although Janay Palmer, now Rice—she married Ray Rice—refused to testify against her husband, prosecutors apparently had this video in their possession. But Rice was able to avoid his aggravated assault charge by entering into a pretrial diversionary program.
For more, we go to Dave Zirin, author of a number of books, sports columnist for The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. His latest article is for The Nation is &quot;The Revictimizing of Janay Rice.&quot;
Dave, just start from the beginning and talk about your response to what has happened.
DAVE ZIRIN : Absolutely. Howard Zinn once said that the first thing we should know about governments is that governments lie. The first thing people should know about the NFL is that the NFL lies. This is a league built on hypocrisy and brain damage, and they want us to believe that they are surprised, absolutely shocked, that some of that violence spilled over into the personal lives of their players. The NFL treats domestic violence as if it is a public relations issue, and their message in this entire story seems to be: If you are going to commit domestic violence, do not get caught on videotape. It is a profoundly cynical message.
And I don&#8217;t—I understand why everybody is showing the videotape. I understand that, because the news value of the videotape shows that, first of all, the New Jersey prosecutors who, by the way, arrested Ray Rice and Janay Palmer when this incident took place, saying both were at fault, the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens, which advanced the narrative that both were at fault, the video gives lie to that, and that is important for people to see. Although, that being said, I think one of the reasons why the videotape is so powerful is that we are conditioned in this society, because of the incredible sexism in this society, to think that in cases of domestic violence, the woman must have done something. And the videotape shows that to be a lie.
I still don&#8217;t understand why so-called progressive sites like The Huffington Post are showing the video while also talking about women&#8217;s beach bodies on the side. I don&#8217;t understand why Chris Matthews on Hardball showed the video on a loop while they were talking about it. And that&#8217;s why I wrote the article about how this video also revictimizes Janay Rice, because domestic violence counselors talk about how every time it is shown without her consent, it actually serves the purpose of hurting her. But the one thing that it does do is that it exposes profoundly the hypocrisy of the National Football League in terms of how it deals with domestic violence.
AARON MATÉ: Dave, what do you make of the NFL&#8217;s claim that they didn&#8217;t see the video until it was released by TMZ ?
DAVE ZIRIN : People should understand that the National Football League has an entire security operation that&#8217;s populated by people who used to work for the Secret Service of the United States. So, that&#8217;s considered the plum job when you&#8217;re done with the Secret Service. So then you have to ask yourself a question. Either the former Secret Service officers who work for the National Football League decided that they were not going to pursue this videotape, so the NFL has plausible—had plausible deniability and they could sweep this case under the rug like they always do with issues of domestic violence, or the NFL saw it and they&#8217;re lying. And I would actually bend towards the latter. I find that it&#8217;s strains credulity to think that the NFL did not see the videotape.
But either way, the NFL has handled this horribly from the very beginning. The first time Roger Goodell met with Janay Rice, he met with her right next to Ray Rice. They came together to his office to plead for his job and to speak about what happened. Think about that for a second. That goes against every possible practice that people who deal with domestic violence talk about. The idea that the perpetrator and the person who is victimized sit side by side and beg for their economic life in front of a boss figure or an authority figure, I mean, it&#8217;s absolutely repellent. And it says something about how the NFL—how they think about women and how they think about the issue of domestic violence.
AMY GOODMAN : The Baltimore Ravens tweeted in May, quote, &quot;Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.&quot; That tweet has since been deleted?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yes, that tweet was deleted, Amy, yesterday. That&#8217;s when it was deleted. They kept that up on their website for this entire period. The Ravens also staged a press conference where Janay Rice and Ray Rice sat next to each other, so Janay Rice could take, quote-unquote, &quot;her responsibility&quot; for what took place. I mean, so much of this was stage-managed by the Baltimore Ravens to make Ray Rice look as good as possible and to make the team look as supportive of him as possible. Once again, though, this is not the Baltimore Ravens in a vacuum. This is how the NFL , league-wide, deals with domestic violence. A player for the San Francisco 49ers named Ray McDonald was arrested after his pregnant fiancée was found with bruises on her body after a party and she called the police. Ray McDonald still played this past weekend despite those charges against him. Why did he play? Because he was not caught on videotape. If he was, he probably would not have been playing. So, once again, this is about a National Football League that treats violence against women as a public relations crisis, not as a crisis about the ways in which the violence of the game spills over into people&#8217;s families.
AARON MATÉ: Dave, this is NFL insider Adam Schefter speaking to ESPN Monday night, reacting to the video showing Ray Rice knock his wife unconscious.
ADAM SCHEFTER : This is arguably the biggest black eye the league has ever had. We heard Pete Rozelle talk in the days after and the years after JFK was assassinated that his biggest regret was playing games the Sunday after the president of the United States was assassinated. Roger Goodell will look back on his time as the commissioner in the NFL and say this is easily the biggest regret.
AARON MATÉ: That&#8217;s Adam Schefter speaking Monday, Adam Scefter of ESPN . I have to point out that after Ray Rice was suspended for two games initially, Schefter said on the air, &quot;It&#8217;s a suspension that will [generate] a lot of discussion. Was the commissioner lenient enough?&quot; Dave Zirin?
DAVE ZIRIN : Look, I think that is a shameful phrase by Adam Schefter. I don&#8217;t know if Democracy Now! listeners may realize that Adam Schefter is considered the ultimate NFL insider, incredibly high-profile. He&#8217;s clearly very upset that he was lied to about the NFL throughout this whole process about what they knew and when they knew it. And he&#8217;s responding, sounding more like Keith Olbermann than Adam Schefter.
But that being said, to call this, quote-unquote, &quot;the biggest black eye&quot; in NFL history, unfortunate phrasing aside for a domestic violence incident, it&#8217;s really shameful for him to say that, because the NFL has a history of horrific moments of violence against women, cases of serial rape, cases of murder. I mean, just two years ago, a player for the Kansas City Chiefs killed the mother of his child, Kasandra Perkins, and then took his own life in front of his coach in the parking lot of the stadium. Yet that&#8217;s not the biggest black eye in NFL history? So what makes this, in Adam Schefter&#8217;s eye, so much worse? It&#8217;s because it was caught on videotape, and it is a public relations crisis for the National Football League.
As long as we look at this through the lens of public relations, we&#8217;re never going to get to the bottom of this issue, which is, how do you deal with the fact that you have an incredibly violent game that causes head injuries, that causes all kinds of financial pressure on families that tend to come from poverty, and then how do you deal with it when that violence spills over into the personal lives and families of players? The NFL , for decades, has treated it as something that you push under the rug, yet in an era where everybody has phones, everything is digital, video cameras everywhere, that is much, much more difficult to do.
AMY GOODMAN : Dave, San Francisco 49ers defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested August 31st on felony domestic violence charges in San Jose. Despite the arrest, he started in the 49ers opening game on Sunday. The team is coached by Jim Harbaugh, the brother of Ravens coach John Harbaugh. Can you talk about this—the two brothers, the Ravens, the 49ers, the two Rays, Ray McDonald and Ray Rice?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yeah. I mean, a lot of symmetry at work there. Jim Harbaugh, interestingly enough, is somebody who for a long time has had—I&#8217;ve talked to people who are involved in that organization—who has said to players that violence against women is the one thing that he will never tolerate on this team. He has said that to players in closed-door meetings. It&#8217;s something that he apparently believes very strongly. Although if people know Jim Harbaugh, you&#8217;ll know that he phrases those kinds of declarations with the same kind of masculinist, patriarchal verve that unfortunately so too often colors how people respond to domestic violence, as if you have to have, you know, a much more manly approach to it and that&#8217;s the only way you&#8217;re going to actually squelch it. And that&#8217;s how Jim Harbaugh has approached it. Yet, unfortunately, even though Jim Harbaugh has had that rhetoric for so long, there was Ray McDonald on the field of play in San Francisco.
And once again, I said this earlier, Amy, but it really does expose how videotape has played a role in this, and because people don&#8217;t believe victims in this country. I mean, it&#8217;s the same thing that we&#8217;re talking about with Ferguson. I mean, the assumption among the majority of the United States that somehow Michael Brown must have been at fault, even though he&#8217;s the one who ended up dead, is so similar to the rhetoric around Janay Rice, to the rhetoric around Ray McDonald in San Francisco. Somehow, the woman must have been at fault, because people don&#8217;t want to believe, whether it&#8217;s the police or their NFL heroes, that maybe, just maybe, in these very violent jobs, that violence leads to acts of power and injustice.
AMY GOODMAN : Dave, I have to say, we, too, ran that video, this new video that shows what happened inside, as you were talking. And you have said you think it&#8217;s wrong to run this video. I know there is a controversy around this, and I&#8217;d like to get listeners&#8217;, viewers&#8217;, readers&#8217; responses. You could email us, go to tweet, Facebook, whatever you&#8217;d like, to know—to let us know what you think. But that video has certainly changed everything here. Yet I do wonder—
DAVE ZIRIN : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : —what did people think actually happened in that elevator? The first video that we all played was that video of Rice dragging his unconscious then-fiancée, now-wife, out of the elevator. He admitted he assaulted her in the elevator, and that&#8217;s exactly what the video shows.
DAVE ZIRIN : I mean, what it exposes, first of all, is the degree of complicity among the prosecutor&#8217;s office, who originally charged both Ray Rice and Janay Rice; the National Football League, which when Roger Goodell, the commissioner, said both Rices take responsibility for what took place; and the Baltimore Ravens, who staged that press conference where Janay Rice, quote-unquote, &quot;took responsibility&quot; for what happened—is that they all advanced this narrative that said, &quot;Well, we don&#8217;t know what happened in that elevator.&quot; But this idea that somehow she provoked Ray Rice punching her, the video shows that to be a lie. What&#8217;s so tragic about the United States, what&#8217;s so tragic about how we view violence against women, is that we assume that that is what happened. The assumption is not with the person who was knocked unconscious; the assumption is that she must have done something to deserve it. And that&#8217;s the thing that really makes me shake my head. And that&#8217;s—I think we have to get beyond this idea that the oppressed are somehow only vindicated if we see it with our own eyes. They never get the benefit of the doubt.
AARON MATÉ: Dave, if TMZ had this video, then obviously the prosecution likely had it, too. So does this raise questions about how prosecutors handled this case? They had a video of their suspect punching the victim.
DAVE ZIRIN : There&#8217;s no question about it. And just so people understand, that videotape, the importance of it from a prosecutorial standpoint is that they did not need Janay Rice&#8217;s consent to go forward with the prosecution, because Janay Rice, she did not want to cooperate with the prosecution. She made that choice. And in some states, if the person who is assaulted does not cooperate, it&#8217;s pretty standard for the prosecutor to then drop the case. But if you have videotape, all of that goes out the window, obviously, because you have objective proof of what took case. Yet the prosecutors still decided not to go forward. Every legal expert who I&#8217;ve both heard and spoken to over the last 24 hours say that this is profoundly unusual and that it certainly does look like that Ray Rice&#8217;s fame, his money, his connections to the National Football League are all things that—there&#8217;s no other explanation—played a role in the fact that they went for a pretrial diversion program and not for actually prosecuting him for the assault itself.
AMY GOODMAN : Wasn&#8217;t Ray Rice also applauded when he came back after his two suspensions?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yes, he was. He was applauded by the Baltimore faithful when he came out onto the field. I mean, that reflects a couple of things. It reflects our attitude nationally about domestic violence, but it also reflects the narrative that the National Football League and the Baltimore Ravens put forward through these last several months. And that&#8217;s the thing that they&#8217;re going to have to live down. You know, Amy, the slogan for the National Football League for all of these crises has always been &quot;hate the player, don&#8217;t hate the game.&quot; In other words, all of the criticism should go on the miscreant player, and the game itself must—is protected at all costs. This is the first time in my reporting lifetime, Amy, that it feels like the scandal of the individual player is having a massive blowback effect on the league itself, and that makes this very newsworthy and very different.
AARON MATÉ: Dave, the new policy on domestic violence, that was announced after the Ray Rice suspension generated so much outrage when he was just given two games, a two-game suspension, was that now the players will get six-games suspension. How does this compare to how the league handles drug offenses?
DAVE ZIRIN : Well, it&#8217;s interesting, because the drug offenses is carefully planned out in the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association. First offense, you get X amount of games; second offense, you get X amount of games. There are all sorts of programs that you can go into. There&#8217;s different penalties for different drugs. So it&#8217;s very clearly spelled out. Domestic violence has been a blank slate in the NFL for decades. And in a lot of ways, frankly, until Roger Goodell said, &quot;First offense, six games; second offense, lifetime ban,&quot; it was still a blank slate. I mean, this idea that somehow Roger Goodell was only bound to give Ray Rice two games is an absolute joke, because there were no guidelines around domestic violence, so the two games only spoke to how seriously the NFL takes domestic violence.
That being said, I have a great deal of problems, having spoken to advocates who work with violence against women, who work in domestic violence shelters, about the whole six-game and then lifetime suspension, the sort of big hammer approach that the NFL is clearly going to adopt now, going forward, because one of the things that does creates, according to people who work on this for a living, is that it creates a disincentive for women to come forward and speak about situations of abuse, especially if the entire economic security of their family is at stake in a career and in a league where the average career lifespan is only three-and-a-half years. And so, any time the NFL creates something to deal with domestic violence that disincentivizes women coming forward, that&#8217;s something that needs to be looked at very carefully.
AMY GOODMAN : Dave, in July, Pro Bowl defensive end Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers was convicted by a district judge in North Carolina of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Hardy exercised his right to a jury trial, likely to take place after the season. He also played on Sunday. According to ESPN , Hardy faces a six-game suspension by the NFL if his guilty verdict for domestic violence is not overturned on appeal.
DAVE ZIRIN : Yeah, and he was not caught on videotape, so he plays, just like Ray McDonald. There are players in the NFL Hall of Fame who have been convicted and arrested on domestic violence issues. One wonders if they would be there if they had been caught on videotape. The video aspect of it is so troubling in this case, because I still stand by what I wrote in The Nation , that the showing and reshowing of the videotape revictimizes Janay Rice because it is being shown without her consent. If it was a sexual assault, we would not be showing it. There&#8217;s a reason why we have rape shield laws in this country. But that being said, the videotape is also the only thing that&#8217;s making people believe Janay Rice. I mean, this is why people want police officers to have video cameras now on their lapels, because this idea that nobody really trusts the processes that happen unless they can see them with their own eyes. And the NFL clearly has a problem, going back decades, when it deals with domestic violence. And this is certainly a wake-up call, if for no other reason than that when people are seeing how the NFL actually deals with things, how the sausages are in fact made to get us our three hours of commodified violence every Sunday, I mean, people are recoiling.
AMY GOODMAN : Should Goodell resign?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yes, absolutely, Roger Goodell should resign, not only for this, but he should resign because of the way he has handled concussions and head injuries on the job. He should resign for the way he has handled the Washington slur name here in the nation&#8217;s capital, defending its use. And he should resign for all the myriad ways that he has put the interests of the league ahead of the interests of players, fans and the general culture.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly, college football, you know, not just the NFL , people like Derrick Washington of University of Missouri, Jameis Winston of Florida State, can you talk about them?
DAVE ZIRIN : Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people should read the work of Jessica Luther, who writes extensively about college football and domestic violence and sexual assault. I mean, the connective tissue is so particularly egregious on the collegiate level because, of course, the players are, quote-unquote, &quot;student athletes&quot; and not workers. So what&#8217;s created instead is this gutter economy where women are basically held up as the perks of playing, the perks of supplying your college with millions of dollars in revenue, and all you get for it is an education that you don&#8217;t have time to attend or classes that you may not even be educationally prepared to attend. And so, this is the problem in the NCAA , and this is why this problem keeps replicating itself in the NCAA , that very dangerous connective tissue between football, particularly amateur football, and sexual violence.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you very much, Dave Zirin, for being with us. Dave is sports columnist for The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. His latest piece , &quot;The Revictimizing of Janay Rice,&quot; we&#8217;ll link to it online. Dave is also author of many books, among them, his latest, Brazil&#8217;s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy . This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute. AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the sporting news that has put a new spotlight on domestic violence and its lax treatment by the country’s most popular sport. The National Football League has indefinitely suspended star running back Ray Rice over a video showing him punching his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, leaving her unconscious. The video, from February, was released Monday by the tabloid website TMZ. And a warning as we show it to our television audience, it is graphic.

On the tape, Rice and Janay Palmer are seen arguing in the elevator of a casino. As Palmer lunges toward Rice, he strikes her in the face, and she falls back and slams her head against the elevator wall. Rice then drags her from the elevator as she lays motionless.

In addition to his league suspension, Rice has also been cut by his football team, the Baltimore Ravens. That’s a reversal from just weeks ago, when head coach [John] Harbaugh stood by Rice and praised his handling of the fallout. On Monday, Harbaugh said the new video changed the team’s perception of the incident.

JOHNHARBAUGH: You know, it’s something we saw for the first time today, you know, all of us. And it changed things, of course. You know, it made things a little bit different.

AMYGOODMAN: But Harbaugh’s explanation may not satisfy critics, who say the Ravens and the league mishandled Rice’s assault from the start. The details in this case have been known for months. Video from a different camera angle had previously been released of Rice dragging Palmer out of the elevator and dropping her face-first onto the ground, unconscious. The tape released Monday was previously known to exist, but the NFL’s first response in July was to suspend Rice for just two games. That sparked a massive public outcry that led NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to apologize and change the league’s domestic violence policy. The Ravens now say they’ve suspended Rice because he was dishonest with them about the incident.

And despite reports to the contrary, the NFL now claims it never saw the new video, saying law enforcement did not make it available. That in turn raises questions for New Jersey prosecutors. Although Janay Palmer, now Rice—she married Ray Rice—refused to testify against her husband, prosecutors apparently had this video in their possession. But Rice was able to avoid his aggravated assault charge by entering into a pretrial diversionary program.

For more, we go to Dave Zirin, author of a number of books, sports columnist for The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. His latest article is for The Nation is "The Revictimizing of Janay Rice."

Dave, just start from the beginning and talk about your response to what has happened.

DAVEZIRIN: Absolutely. Howard Zinn once said that the first thing we should know about governments is that governments lie. The first thing people should know about the NFL is that the NFL lies. This is a league built on hypocrisy and brain damage, and they want us to believe that they are surprised, absolutely shocked, that some of that violence spilled over into the personal lives of their players. The NFL treats domestic violence as if it is a public relations issue, and their message in this entire story seems to be: If you are going to commit domestic violence, do not get caught on videotape. It is a profoundly cynical message.

And I don’t—I understand why everybody is showing the videotape. I understand that, because the news value of the videotape shows that, first of all, the New Jersey prosecutors who, by the way, arrested Ray Rice and Janay Palmer when this incident took place, saying both were at fault, the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens, which advanced the narrative that both were at fault, the video gives lie to that, and that is important for people to see. Although, that being said, I think one of the reasons why the videotape is so powerful is that we are conditioned in this society, because of the incredible sexism in this society, to think that in cases of domestic violence, the woman must have done something. And the videotape shows that to be a lie.

I still don’t understand why so-called progressive sites like The Huffington Post are showing the video while also talking about women’s beach bodies on the side. I don’t understand why Chris Matthews on Hardball showed the video on a loop while they were talking about it. And that’s why I wrote the article about how this video also revictimizes Janay Rice, because domestic violence counselors talk about how every time it is shown without her consent, it actually serves the purpose of hurting her. But the one thing that it does do is that it exposes profoundly the hypocrisy of the National Football League in terms of how it deals with domestic violence.

AARON MATÉ: Dave, what do you make of the NFL’s claim that they didn’t see the video until it was released by TMZ?

DAVEZIRIN: People should understand that the National Football League has an entire security operation that’s populated by people who used to work for the Secret Service of the United States. So, that’s considered the plum job when you’re done with the Secret Service. So then you have to ask yourself a question. Either the former Secret Service officers who work for the National Football League decided that they were not going to pursue this videotape, so the NFL has plausible—had plausible deniability and they could sweep this case under the rug like they always do with issues of domestic violence, or the NFL saw it and they’re lying. And I would actually bend towards the latter. I find that it’s strains credulity to think that the NFL did not see the videotape.

But either way, the NFL has handled this horribly from the very beginning. The first time Roger Goodell met with Janay Rice, he met with her right next to Ray Rice. They came together to his office to plead for his job and to speak about what happened. Think about that for a second. That goes against every possible practice that people who deal with domestic violence talk about. The idea that the perpetrator and the person who is victimized sit side by side and beg for their economic life in front of a boss figure or an authority figure, I mean, it’s absolutely repellent. And it says something about how the NFL—how they think about women and how they think about the issue of domestic violence.

AMYGOODMAN: The Baltimore Ravens tweeted in May, quote, "Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident." That tweet has since been deleted?

DAVEZIRIN: Yes, that tweet was deleted, Amy, yesterday. That’s when it was deleted. They kept that up on their website for this entire period. The Ravens also staged a press conference where Janay Rice and Ray Rice sat next to each other, so Janay Rice could take, quote-unquote, "her responsibility" for what took place. I mean, so much of this was stage-managed by the Baltimore Ravens to make Ray Rice look as good as possible and to make the team look as supportive of him as possible. Once again, though, this is not the Baltimore Ravens in a vacuum. This is how the NFL, league-wide, deals with domestic violence. A player for the San Francisco 49ers named Ray McDonald was arrested after his pregnant fiancée was found with bruises on her body after a party and she called the police. Ray McDonald still played this past weekend despite those charges against him. Why did he play? Because he was not caught on videotape. If he was, he probably would not have been playing. So, once again, this is about a National Football League that treats violence against women as a public relations crisis, not as a crisis about the ways in which the violence of the game spills over into people’s families.

ADAMSCHEFTER: This is arguably the biggest black eye the league has ever had. We heard Pete Rozelle talk in the days after and the years after JFK was assassinated that his biggest regret was playing games the Sunday after the president of the United States was assassinated. Roger Goodell will look back on his time as the commissioner in the NFL and say this is easily the biggest regret.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Adam Schefter speaking Monday, Adam Scefter of ESPN. I have to point out that after Ray Rice was suspended for two games initially, Schefter said on the air, "It’s a suspension that will [generate] a lot of discussion. Was the commissioner lenient enough?" Dave Zirin?

DAVEZIRIN: Look, I think that is a shameful phrase by Adam Schefter. I don’t know if Democracy Now! listeners may realize that Adam Schefter is considered the ultimate NFL insider, incredibly high-profile. He’s clearly very upset that he was lied to about the NFL throughout this whole process about what they knew and when they knew it. And he’s responding, sounding more like Keith Olbermann than Adam Schefter.

But that being said, to call this, quote-unquote, "the biggest black eye" in NFL history, unfortunate phrasing aside for a domestic violence incident, it’s really shameful for him to say that, because the NFL has a history of horrific moments of violence against women, cases of serial rape, cases of murder. I mean, just two years ago, a player for the Kansas City Chiefs killed the mother of his child, Kasandra Perkins, and then took his own life in front of his coach in the parking lot of the stadium. Yet that’s not the biggest black eye in NFL history? So what makes this, in Adam Schefter’s eye, so much worse? It’s because it was caught on videotape, and it is a public relations crisis for the National Football League.

As long as we look at this through the lens of public relations, we’re never going to get to the bottom of this issue, which is, how do you deal with the fact that you have an incredibly violent game that causes head injuries, that causes all kinds of financial pressure on families that tend to come from poverty, and then how do you deal with it when that violence spills over into the personal lives and families of players? The NFL, for decades, has treated it as something that you push under the rug, yet in an era where everybody has phones, everything is digital, video cameras everywhere, that is much, much more difficult to do.

AMYGOODMAN: Dave, San Francisco 49ers defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested August 31st on felony domestic violence charges in San Jose. Despite the arrest, he started in the 49ers opening game on Sunday. The team is coached by Jim Harbaugh, the brother of Ravens coach John Harbaugh. Can you talk about this—the two brothers, the Ravens, the 49ers, the two Rays, Ray McDonald and Ray Rice?

DAVEZIRIN: Yeah. I mean, a lot of symmetry at work there. Jim Harbaugh, interestingly enough, is somebody who for a long time has had—I’ve talked to people who are involved in that organization—who has said to players that violence against women is the one thing that he will never tolerate on this team. He has said that to players in closed-door meetings. It’s something that he apparently believes very strongly. Although if people know Jim Harbaugh, you’ll know that he phrases those kinds of declarations with the same kind of masculinist, patriarchal verve that unfortunately so too often colors how people respond to domestic violence, as if you have to have, you know, a much more manly approach to it and that’s the only way you’re going to actually squelch it. And that’s how Jim Harbaugh has approached it. Yet, unfortunately, even though Jim Harbaugh has had that rhetoric for so long, there was Ray McDonald on the field of play in San Francisco.

And once again, I said this earlier, Amy, but it really does expose how videotape has played a role in this, and because people don’t believe victims in this country. I mean, it’s the same thing that we’re talking about with Ferguson. I mean, the assumption among the majority of the United States that somehow Michael Brown must have been at fault, even though he’s the one who ended up dead, is so similar to the rhetoric around Janay Rice, to the rhetoric around Ray McDonald in San Francisco. Somehow, the woman must have been at fault, because people don’t want to believe, whether it’s the police or their NFL heroes, that maybe, just maybe, in these very violent jobs, that violence leads to acts of power and injustice.

AMYGOODMAN: Dave, I have to say, we, too, ran that video, this new video that shows what happened inside, as you were talking. And you have said you think it’s wrong to run this video. I know there is a controversy around this, and I’d like to get listeners’, viewers’, readers’ responses. You could email us, go to tweet, Facebook, whatever you’d like, to know—to let us know what you think. But that video has certainly changed everything here. Yet I do wonder—

DAVEZIRIN: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: —what did people think actually happened in that elevator? The first video that we all played was that video of Rice dragging his unconscious then-fiancée, now-wife, out of the elevator. He admitted he assaulted her in the elevator, and that’s exactly what the video shows.

DAVEZIRIN: I mean, what it exposes, first of all, is the degree of complicity among the prosecutor’s office, who originally charged both Ray Rice and Janay Rice; the National Football League, which when Roger Goodell, the commissioner, said both Rices take responsibility for what took place; and the Baltimore Ravens, who staged that press conference where Janay Rice, quote-unquote, "took responsibility" for what happened—is that they all advanced this narrative that said, "Well, we don’t know what happened in that elevator." But this idea that somehow she provoked Ray Rice punching her, the video shows that to be a lie. What’s so tragic about the United States, what’s so tragic about how we view violence against women, is that we assume that that is what happened. The assumption is not with the person who was knocked unconscious; the assumption is that she must have done something to deserve it. And that’s the thing that really makes me shake my head. And that’s—I think we have to get beyond this idea that the oppressed are somehow only vindicated if we see it with our own eyes. They never get the benefit of the doubt.

AARON MATÉ: Dave, if TMZ had this video, then obviously the prosecution likely had it, too. So does this raise questions about how prosecutors handled this case? They had a video of their suspect punching the victim.

DAVEZIRIN: There’s no question about it. And just so people understand, that videotape, the importance of it from a prosecutorial standpoint is that they did not need Janay Rice’s consent to go forward with the prosecution, because Janay Rice, she did not want to cooperate with the prosecution. She made that choice. And in some states, if the person who is assaulted does not cooperate, it’s pretty standard for the prosecutor to then drop the case. But if you have videotape, all of that goes out the window, obviously, because you have objective proof of what took case. Yet the prosecutors still decided not to go forward. Every legal expert who I’ve both heard and spoken to over the last 24 hours say that this is profoundly unusual and that it certainly does look like that Ray Rice’s fame, his money, his connections to the National Football League are all things that—there’s no other explanation—played a role in the fact that they went for a pretrial diversion program and not for actually prosecuting him for the assault itself.

AMYGOODMAN: Wasn’t Ray Rice also applauded when he came back after his two suspensions?

DAVEZIRIN: Yes, he was. He was applauded by the Baltimore faithful when he came out onto the field. I mean, that reflects a couple of things. It reflects our attitude nationally about domestic violence, but it also reflects the narrative that the National Football League and the Baltimore Ravens put forward through these last several months. And that’s the thing that they’re going to have to live down. You know, Amy, the slogan for the National Football League for all of these crises has always been "hate the player, don’t hate the game." In other words, all of the criticism should go on the miscreant player, and the game itself must—is protected at all costs. This is the first time in my reporting lifetime, Amy, that it feels like the scandal of the individual player is having a massive blowback effect on the league itself, and that makes this very newsworthy and very different.

AARON MATÉ: Dave, the new policy on domestic violence, that was announced after the Ray Rice suspension generated so much outrage when he was just given two games, a two-game suspension, was that now the players will get six-games suspension. How does this compare to how the league handles drug offenses?

DAVEZIRIN: Well, it’s interesting, because the drug offenses is carefully planned out in the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association. First offense, you get X amount of games; second offense, you get X amount of games. There are all sorts of programs that you can go into. There’s different penalties for different drugs. So it’s very clearly spelled out. Domestic violence has been a blank slate in the NFL for decades. And in a lot of ways, frankly, until Roger Goodell said, "First offense, six games; second offense, lifetime ban," it was still a blank slate. I mean, this idea that somehow Roger Goodell was only bound to give Ray Rice two games is an absolute joke, because there were no guidelines around domestic violence, so the two games only spoke to how seriously the NFL takes domestic violence.

That being said, I have a great deal of problems, having spoken to advocates who work with violence against women, who work in domestic violence shelters, about the whole six-game and then lifetime suspension, the sort of big hammer approach that the NFL is clearly going to adopt now, going forward, because one of the things that does creates, according to people who work on this for a living, is that it creates a disincentive for women to come forward and speak about situations of abuse, especially if the entire economic security of their family is at stake in a career and in a league where the average career lifespan is only three-and-a-half years. And so, any time the NFL creates something to deal with domestic violence that disincentivizes women coming forward, that’s something that needs to be looked at very carefully.

AMYGOODMAN: Dave, in July, Pro Bowl defensive end Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers was convicted by a district judge in North Carolina of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Hardy exercised his right to a jury trial, likely to take place after the season. He also played on Sunday. According to ESPN, Hardy faces a six-game suspension by the NFL if his guilty verdict for domestic violence is not overturned on appeal.

DAVEZIRIN: Yeah, and he was not caught on videotape, so he plays, just like Ray McDonald. There are players in the NFL Hall of Fame who have been convicted and arrested on domestic violence issues. One wonders if they would be there if they had been caught on videotape. The video aspect of it is so troubling in this case, because I still stand by what I wrote in The Nation, that the showing and reshowing of the videotape revictimizes Janay Rice because it is being shown without her consent. If it was a sexual assault, we would not be showing it. There’s a reason why we have rape shield laws in this country. But that being said, the videotape is also the only thing that’s making people believe Janay Rice. I mean, this is why people want police officers to have video cameras now on their lapels, because this idea that nobody really trusts the processes that happen unless they can see them with their own eyes. And the NFL clearly has a problem, going back decades, when it deals with domestic violence. And this is certainly a wake-up call, if for no other reason than that when people are seeing how the NFL actually deals with things, how the sausages are in fact made to get us our three hours of commodified violence every Sunday, I mean, people are recoiling.

AMYGOODMAN: Should Goodell resign?

DAVEZIRIN: Yes, absolutely, Roger Goodell should resign, not only for this, but he should resign because of the way he has handled concussions and head injuries on the job. He should resign for the way he has handled the Washington slur name here in the nation’s capital, defending its use. And he should resign for all the myriad ways that he has put the interests of the league ahead of the interests of players, fans and the general culture.

AMYGOODMAN: Very quickly, college football, you know, not just the NFL, people like Derrick Washington of University of Missouri, Jameis Winston of Florida State, can you talk about them?

DAVEZIRIN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people should read the work of Jessica Luther, who writes extensively about college football and domestic violence and sexual assault. I mean, the connective tissue is so particularly egregious on the collegiate level because, of course, the players are, quote-unquote, "student athletes" and not workers. So what’s created instead is this gutter economy where women are basically held up as the perks of playing, the perks of supplying your college with millions of dollars in revenue, and all you get for it is an education that you don’t have time to attend or classes that you may not even be educationally prepared to attend. And so, this is the problem in the NCAA, and this is why this problem keeps replicating itself in the NCAA, that very dangerous connective tissue between football, particularly amateur football, and sexual violence.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much, Dave Zirin, for being with us. Dave is sports columnist for The Nation magazine, host of Edge of Sports Radio on SiriusXM. His latest piece, "The Revictimizing of Janay Rice," we’ll link to it online. Dave is also author of many books, among them, his latest, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

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Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400#YesAllWomen: Rebecca Solnit on the Santa Barbara Massacre & Viral Response to Misogynist Violencehttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/27/yesallwomen_rebecca_solnit_on_the_santa
tag:democracynow.org,2014-05-27:en/story/f8b19c AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the massacre in Santa Barbara, California, where a gunman killed six other people and wounded 13 others. Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college student, fatally stabbed three roommates at his apartment complex near the University of California, Santa Barbara. He then opened fire at a nearby sorority house, killing two women. Rodger continued his rampage with a drive-by shooting on scores of pedestrians, killing one. The attack ended when he crashed his vehicle, found dead at the wheel of what police called a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The rampage was part of a plot Rodger outlined in videos and a manifesto posted online hours before. He described his anger at being sexually rejected by female classmates. He spoke of launching a, quote, &quot;war on women&quot; for failing to see him as, quote, &quot;the true alpha male.&quot;
ELLIOT RODGER : Girls have never been attracted to me. I don&#8217;t know why you girls aren&#8217;t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It&#8217;s an injustice, a crime, because I don&#8217;t know what you don&#8217;t see in me. I&#8217;m the perfect guy. I&#8217;ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male.
AMY GOODMAN : Elliot Rodger was armed with three semiautomatic handguns and multiple rounds of ammunition, all of which he had purchased legally. In an emotional statement the following day, Richard Martinez spoke out about the loss of his 20-year-old son Christopher, who was killed in the rampage. Martinez denounced the National Rifle Association and the politicians who stand in the way of gun control.
RICHARD MARTINEZ : Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA . They talk about gun rights. What about Chris&#8217;s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, &quot;Stop this madness! We don&#8217;t have to live like this&quot;? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, &quot;Not one more!&quot;
AARON MATÉ: The massacre also prompted an unprecedented reaction online with tens of thousands of women joining together to tell their stories of sexual violence, harassment and intimidation. By Sunday, the hashtag #YesAllWomen had been used over 500,000 times, the most on Twitter. In speaking out, women were placing the shooting inside a broader context of misogynist violence. While there&#8217;s been intense scrutiny of the shooter&#8217;s background and mental illness, there has been far less focus on a culture of violence in which nearly all mass shootings are carried out by men, and people like Elliot Rodger feel entitled to victimize the women who reject them.
AMY GOODMAN : In her new book, Men Explain Things to Me , the writer, historian, activist Rebecca Solnit tackles this issue and many others. She writes, quote, &quot;We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it&#8217;s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn&#8217;t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender,&quot; she writes.
Rebecca Solnit joins us from the studios of San Francisco. A writer, historian and activist, she has written over a dozen books, including her latest, Men Explain Things to Me . She is also a contributing editor at Harper&#8217;s Magazine .
Rebecca, your response to what happened in Santa Barbara over the weekend on Friday?
REBECCA SOLNIT : One of the things that was fascinating was the battle of the story. There was such a mainstream desire to say, &quot;Oh, this was aberrant. Oh, he was mentally ill. This has nothing to do with us. This raises no big questions.&quot; And to see feminists and allies speak out and say, &quot;No, this is about misogyny, this is about entitlement,&quot; was really extraordinary. The term &quot;sexual entitlement,&quot; which I had heard before, but not widespread, suddenly began to be used everywhere. And it feels like it really changed the conversation, because so many people insisted on it, so many people got it—this sense that this guy was owed something by women and was furious at them for not giving it to him and that he had the right to exact revenge and all kinds of, you know, what our government calls &quot;collateral damage&quot; on the people around him because his needs weren&#8217;t being met.
AARON MATÉ: What can we learn here about the broader culture that enables people like this to do what he did?
REBECCA SOLNIT : I absolutely agree with Richard Martinez that the availability of guns is a huge problem. I think it&#8217;s part of a toxic brew in our culture right now that includes modeling masculinity and maleness as extremely—as violence, as domination, as entitlement, as control, and women as worthless, as disposable, as things men have the right to control, etc. And, you know, as well as one of the sad things is that he seemed to have incredibly conventional ideas about what constituted happiness and well-being and his entitlement to them. He seemed to have no resources, no models of alternative ways to meet your needs to be happy, to connect to human beings. So, all of that needs to be addressed, but particularly the violence against women, which is a huge epidemic in this country right now.
AMY GOODMAN : Journalist Laurie Penny wrote an article in the New Statesman headlined &quot;Let&#8217;s Call the Isla Vista Killings What They Were: Misogynist Extremism.&quot; In it, Penny writes, quote, &quot;When news of the murders broke, when the digital world began to absorb and discuss its meaning, I had been about to email my editor to request a few days off, because the impact of some particularly horrendous rape threats had left me shaken, and I needed time to collect my thoughts. Instead of taking that time, I am writing this blog, and I am doing so in rage and in grief—not just for the victims of the Isla Vista massacre, but for what is being lost everywhere as the language and ideology of the new misogyny continues to be excused.&quot; Rebecca Solnit, I was wondering if you can comment on this and the fact that it&#8217;s not just one video that Elliot Rodger had posted online. He posted numerous videos. And what was his—the indications of his hatred of women before this and why he had not been dealt with?
REBECCA SOLNIT : I think what&#8217;s important is to look at the broader picture. He killed six people, but three women every day in the United States are killed by domestic partners, ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, etc. You know, this is not an isolated event, but part of an epidemic. And you can look at other things he did earlier. In his 140-page sort of manifesto autobiography, he talks about trying to push women off a ledge at a party because they weren&#8217;t paying attention to [him], throwing coffee on girls who didn&#8217;t respond the way he wanted them to. And you can see these micro-aggressions, and just as you can see Laurie Penny being given rape and death threats, that there is a huge, broad network that we need to look at, and not just this guy, but the fact that, as the hastag says at #YesAllWomen, yes, all women face these kinds of things, not just the women who died and were shot in Isla Vista and the male—you know, the men who got caught in the crossfire. So, you know, I think that we need to broaden the focus from this one guy, who&#8217;s no longer alive, and his misery and rage, and to look at the broad picture of how well he fits into a culture of entitlement, how well he fits into a culture of rage, how well he fits into a culture that considers women tools and playthings and property. And then we need to start addressing that. Or maybe we just need to broaden and deepen the way that some of us have been addressing it for decades, including you, of course.
AARON MATÉ: And, Rebecca Solnit, in your book, Men Explain Things to Me , you talk about the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman in New Delhi, and you talk about how that sort of spawned a Emmett Till moment, where India sort of had a reckoning with its rape culture. With the proliferation of—like, with the explosion of the #YesAllWomen hashtag and the response that you saw, are you seeing a similar moment here?
REBECCA SOLNIT : I think we are. I actually feel like, in early 2013, really worldwide, very strongly in India and the United States, we changed the way we talked about rape. You know, we won the battle of the story to stop treating rape as sort of isolated, aberrant incidents and treat it as a widespread problem that arises not from anomalies in the culture, but from the mainstream of the culture. And changing the language was part of that. The word &quot;rape culture,&quot; or the words &quot;rape culture,&quot; the phrase &quot;rape culture,&quot; became very widespread last year and a really important tool in addressing the epidemic of rapes in the military, on campuses and all over the country and in a lot of parts of the world. I feel like the word this year, because we&#8217;ve made another kind of breakthrough in discussing it, is &quot;sexual entitlement,&quot; so that—to discuss the broad problems that underlie this particular incident.
So, yeah, I feel like we really shook things up this weekend and that we won the battle of the story. There&#8217;s half a million #YesAllWomen tweets. An addressing of the—you know, annoyance of &quot;not all men&quot; as this constant refrain, that changes the subject to the needs of male bystanders, got addressed. And a lot of very powerful women—Laurie Penny, Jennifer Pozner, Amanda Hess and so many more of the great feminist voices of our time—were there immediately to frame this story as a broad story, as a big story, as a story that&#8217;s central to our culture, as a story that impacts all women, not just the women who were directly attacked in Isla Vista. And I think that&#8217;s—
AMY GOODMAN : Rebecca—
REBECCA SOLNIT : —that&#8217;s remarkable. I feel like I saw a huge struggle this weekend and one in which we made enormous gains.
AMY GOODMAN : Rebecca, explain &quot;yes all women,&quot; those words, that phrase.
REBECCA SOLNIT : There&#8217;s this incredibly annoying phrase, &quot;not all men,&quot; that comes up all the time. You know, you say three women a day are murdered by male partners, and so often some guy will say, &quot;Not all men.&quot; An angry feminist said to me yesterday, you know, &quot;What do they want? A cookie for not raping, beating and murdering?&quot; And, you know, we know it&#8217;s not all men, but we need to talk about the fact that it is all women. And that&#8217;s what &quot;yes all women&quot; said, is, &quot;Yeah, we know not all men are rapists and murderers, are not abusers and misogynists, but all women are impacted by the men who are.&quot; And that&#8217;s where the focus needs to be, because it has such a huge impact.
Every woman, every day, when she leaves her house, starts to think about safety: Can I go here? Should I go out there? Do I need to take the main street? Do I need to be in by a certain hour? Do I need to find a taxi? Is the taxi driver going to rape me? You know, women are so hemmed in by fear of men, it profoundly limits our lives. And of course it&#8217;s not all men, but it&#8217;s enough that it impacts all women. And it&#8217;s pretty nearly worldwide. The tweets were coming from all over the English-speaking world and parts of the world that aren&#8217;t primarily English-speaking, to say that this problem impacts me, this problem impacts us, and we need to keep doing things about it. We need to escalate, and we need to address how deeply embedded it is. And we need to make visible what&#8217;s been invisible, and we need to change it. And I think this weekend we really started to do that.
AMY GOODMAN : Rebecca, the title of your book, Men Explain Things to Me , explain it to us, and also the first story and how it relates to what we see this weekend in Santa Barbara.
REBECCA SOLNIT : Yeah, Men Explain Things to Me came about because all my life men would explain things to me that they didn&#8217;t necessarily know better than I did, and sometimes I knew much better than they did, because there was this assumption that because of gender they were just inherently knowledgeable and superior and in control, and I was inherently ignorant and in need of an injection of their knowledge, wisdom, insight, etc.
The title story—or the story that inspired it came about in 2003. I was at a party when some guy said to me, &quot;So, I hear you&#8217;ve written a few books.&quot; And I said, &quot;Several, actually.&quot; I was at about eight books or seven books at that point. And he said, &quot;And what are they about?&quot; And the most recent one was about Eadweard Muybridge. It&#8217;s the father of motion pictures. It&#8217;s called River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West . And he didn&#8217;t comment on that. He said, &quot;Oh, have you heard about the very important Muybridge that just came out?&quot; And he started doing what feminists, immediately after this essay came out, coined or defined as mansplaining—one of the great new words that&#8217;s helped us discuss what&#8217;s going on in the world. He started telling me about this very important book I should know about. And the woman I was with, my friend Sally, kept saying, &quot;That&#8217;s her book.&quot; And he literally didn&#8217;t hear her until she had said it three or four times. So this man was telling me about this book I should know about, and it was a book I had written. And he was so full of himself, he literally couldn&#8217;t hear me, couldn&#8217;t hear her, didn&#8217;t ask questions first.
And that was incredibly funny, but it&#8217;s part of a slippery slope where men assume the right to talk over you, to not listen to you, to tell you how it&#8217;s going to be, to explain reality. What surprised me when I wrote that essay is that I started out with a pretty amusing incident, although one that&#8217;s indicative of sexism and a kind of conversational bullying, and I ended up talking about rapes and murders, the ways that women are literally silenced, deprived of their powers, etc. I think it&#8217;s important that we look at all this stuff together. It begins with these micro-aggressions; it ends with rape and murder and what Italian feminists call &quot;femicide.&quot;
AARON MATÉ: On our show recently, we featured the voices of college women who have been fighting back against sexual assault, both the incident and then the inability—or the refusal of the schools to punish them. Your take on the way schools in this country have handled rape on campus?
REBECCA SOLNIT : It&#8217;s been pretty damn pathetic in a whole lot of ways. One thing is that they tend to worry a lot more in many cases about the well-being of the perpetrators than the victims. Another thing is that they shifted responsibility for preventing rape from men not to rape to women to do all kinds of things to not get raped, which we don&#8217;t do with any other crime. And, you know—and then they haven&#8217;t pursued these things seriously. It&#8217;s also kind of crazy. It&#8217;s like, OK, if there&#8217;s petty vandalism on campus, maybe that&#8217;s a campus issue, but if there&#8217;s a felony crime that involves, you know, a woman being strangled, a woman being brutalized, why is that not turned over to the legal system, which is there to deal with those things, the idea that it&#8217;s an in-house incident? But what—you know, it&#8217;s been mishandled or overlooked, not handled at all, for decades, forever.
But what&#8217;s amazing is, because these young women rose up, they said, &quot;This is not acceptable. This is not a legitimate way to deal with it.&quot; Because they used social media, their voices, the mainstream media, they&#8217;re organizing to say, &quot;This has to stop. This has to change.&quot; They&#8217;re really radically changing how it&#8217;s being treated and exposing the universities—
AMY GOODMAN : Five seconds, Rebecca.
REBECCA SOLNIT : —which are universities from California to Rhode Island, from Florida to Alaska, and saying, &quot;This is going to change.&quot; And they are changing it. This is a very exciting time in feminism. I think that we&#8217;re shifting things profoundly.
AMY GOODMAN : Rebecca Solnit, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Her new book is called Men Explain Things to Me . AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the massacre in Santa Barbara, California, where a gunman killed six other people and wounded 13 others. Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college student, fatally stabbed three roommates at his apartment complex near the University of California, Santa Barbara. He then opened fire at a nearby sorority house, killing two women. Rodger continued his rampage with a drive-by shooting on scores of pedestrians, killing one. The attack ended when he crashed his vehicle, found dead at the wheel of what police called a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The rampage was part of a plot Rodger outlined in videos and a manifesto posted online hours before. He described his anger at being sexually rejected by female classmates. He spoke of launching a, quote, "war on women" for failing to see him as, quote, "the true alpha male."

ELLIOTRODGER: Girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy. I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male.

AMYGOODMAN: Elliot Rodger was armed with three semiautomatic handguns and multiple rounds of ammunition, all of which he had purchased legally. In an emotional statement the following day, Richard Martinez spoke out about the loss of his 20-year-old son Christopher, who was killed in the rampage. Martinez denounced the National Rifle Association and the politicians who stand in the way of gun control.

RICHARDMARTINEZ: Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, "Stop this madness! We don’t have to live like this"? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, "Not one more!"

AARON MATÉ: The massacre also prompted an unprecedented reaction online with tens of thousands of women joining together to tell their stories of sexual violence, harassment and intimidation. By Sunday, the hashtag #YesAllWomen had been used over 500,000 times, the most on Twitter. In speaking out, women were placing the shooting inside a broader context of misogynist violence. While there’s been intense scrutiny of the shooter’s background and mental illness, there has been far less focus on a culture of violence in which nearly all mass shootings are carried out by men, and people like Elliot Rodger feel entitled to victimize the women who reject them.

AMYGOODMAN: In her new book, Men Explain Things to Me, the writer, historian, activist Rebecca Solnit tackles this issue and many others. She writes, quote, "We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender," she writes.

Rebecca Solnit joins us from the studios of San Francisco. A writer, historian and activist, she has written over a dozen books, including her latest, Men Explain Things to Me. She is also a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Rebecca, your response to what happened in Santa Barbara over the weekend on Friday?

REBECCASOLNIT: One of the things that was fascinating was the battle of the story. There was such a mainstream desire to say, "Oh, this was aberrant. Oh, he was mentally ill. This has nothing to do with us. This raises no big questions." And to see feminists and allies speak out and say, "No, this is about misogyny, this is about entitlement," was really extraordinary. The term "sexual entitlement," which I had heard before, but not widespread, suddenly began to be used everywhere. And it feels like it really changed the conversation, because so many people insisted on it, so many people got it—this sense that this guy was owed something by women and was furious at them for not giving it to him and that he had the right to exact revenge and all kinds of, you know, what our government calls "collateral damage" on the people around him because his needs weren’t being met.

AARON MATÉ: What can we learn here about the broader culture that enables people like this to do what he did?

REBECCASOLNIT: I absolutely agree with Richard Martinez that the availability of guns is a huge problem. I think it’s part of a toxic brew in our culture right now that includes modeling masculinity and maleness as extremely—as violence, as domination, as entitlement, as control, and women as worthless, as disposable, as things men have the right to control, etc. And, you know, as well as one of the sad things is that he seemed to have incredibly conventional ideas about what constituted happiness and well-being and his entitlement to them. He seemed to have no resources, no models of alternative ways to meet your needs to be happy, to connect to human beings. So, all of that needs to be addressed, but particularly the violence against women, which is a huge epidemic in this country right now.

AMYGOODMAN: Journalist Laurie Penny wrote an article in the New Statesman headlined "Let’s Call the Isla Vista Killings What They Were: Misogynist Extremism." In it, Penny writes, quote, "When news of the murders broke, when the digital world began to absorb and discuss its meaning, I had been about to email my editor to request a few days off, because the impact of some particularly horrendous rape threats had left me shaken, and I needed time to collect my thoughts. Instead of taking that time, I am writing this blog, and I am doing so in rage and in grief—not just for the victims of the Isla Vista massacre, but for what is being lost everywhere as the language and ideology of the new misogyny continues to be excused." Rebecca Solnit, I was wondering if you can comment on this and the fact that it’s not just one video that Elliot Rodger had posted online. He posted numerous videos. And what was his—the indications of his hatred of women before this and why he had not been dealt with?

REBECCASOLNIT: I think what’s important is to look at the broader picture. He killed six people, but three women every day in the United States are killed by domestic partners, ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, etc. You know, this is not an isolated event, but part of an epidemic. And you can look at other things he did earlier. In his 140-page sort of manifesto autobiography, he talks about trying to push women off a ledge at a party because they weren’t paying attention to [him], throwing coffee on girls who didn’t respond the way he wanted them to. And you can see these micro-aggressions, and just as you can see Laurie Penny being given rape and death threats, that there is a huge, broad network that we need to look at, and not just this guy, but the fact that, as the hastag says at #YesAllWomen, yes, all women face these kinds of things, not just the women who died and were shot in Isla Vista and the male—you know, the men who got caught in the crossfire. So, you know, I think that we need to broaden the focus from this one guy, who’s no longer alive, and his misery and rage, and to look at the broad picture of how well he fits into a culture of entitlement, how well he fits into a culture of rage, how well he fits into a culture that considers women tools and playthings and property. And then we need to start addressing that. Or maybe we just need to broaden and deepen the way that some of us have been addressing it for decades, including you, of course.

AARON MATÉ: And, Rebecca Solnit, in your book, Men Explain Things to Me, you talk about the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman in New Delhi, and you talk about how that sort of spawned a Emmett Till moment, where India sort of had a reckoning with its rape culture. With the proliferation of—like, with the explosion of the #YesAllWomen hashtag and the response that you saw, are you seeing a similar moment here?

REBECCASOLNIT: I think we are. I actually feel like, in early 2013, really worldwide, very strongly in India and the United States, we changed the way we talked about rape. You know, we won the battle of the story to stop treating rape as sort of isolated, aberrant incidents and treat it as a widespread problem that arises not from anomalies in the culture, but from the mainstream of the culture. And changing the language was part of that. The word "rape culture," or the words "rape culture," the phrase "rape culture," became very widespread last year and a really important tool in addressing the epidemic of rapes in the military, on campuses and all over the country and in a lot of parts of the world. I feel like the word this year, because we’ve made another kind of breakthrough in discussing it, is "sexual entitlement," so that—to discuss the broad problems that underlie this particular incident.

So, yeah, I feel like we really shook things up this weekend and that we won the battle of the story. There’s half a million #YesAllWomen tweets. An addressing of the—you know, annoyance of "not all men" as this constant refrain, that changes the subject to the needs of male bystanders, got addressed. And a lot of very powerful women—Laurie Penny, Jennifer Pozner, Amanda Hess and so many more of the great feminist voices of our time—were there immediately to frame this story as a broad story, as a big story, as a story that’s central to our culture, as a story that impacts all women, not just the women who were directly attacked in Isla Vista. And I think that’s—

AMYGOODMAN: Rebecca—

REBECCASOLNIT: —that’s remarkable. I feel like I saw a huge struggle this weekend and one in which we made enormous gains.

AMYGOODMAN: Rebecca, explain "yes all women," those words, that phrase.

REBECCASOLNIT: There’s this incredibly annoying phrase, "not all men," that comes up all the time. You know, you say three women a day are murdered by male partners, and so often some guy will say, "Not all men." An angry feminist said to me yesterday, you know, "What do they want? A cookie for not raping, beating and murdering?" And, you know, we know it’s not all men, but we need to talk about the fact that it is all women. And that’s what "yes all women" said, is, "Yeah, we know not all men are rapists and murderers, are not abusers and misogynists, but all women are impacted by the men who are." And that’s where the focus needs to be, because it has such a huge impact.

Every woman, every day, when she leaves her house, starts to think about safety: Can I go here? Should I go out there? Do I need to take the main street? Do I need to be in by a certain hour? Do I need to find a taxi? Is the taxi driver going to rape me? You know, women are so hemmed in by fear of men, it profoundly limits our lives. And of course it’s not all men, but it’s enough that it impacts all women. And it’s pretty nearly worldwide. The tweets were coming from all over the English-speaking world and parts of the world that aren’t primarily English-speaking, to say that this problem impacts me, this problem impacts us, and we need to keep doing things about it. We need to escalate, and we need to address how deeply embedded it is. And we need to make visible what’s been invisible, and we need to change it. And I think this weekend we really started to do that.

AMYGOODMAN: Rebecca, the title of your book, Men Explain Things to Me, explain it to us, and also the first story and how it relates to what we see this weekend in Santa Barbara.

REBECCASOLNIT: Yeah, Men Explain Things to Me came about because all my life men would explain things to me that they didn’t necessarily know better than I did, and sometimes I knew much better than they did, because there was this assumption that because of gender they were just inherently knowledgeable and superior and in control, and I was inherently ignorant and in need of an injection of their knowledge, wisdom, insight, etc.

The title story—or the story that inspired it came about in 2003. I was at a party when some guy said to me, "So, I hear you’ve written a few books." And I said, "Several, actually." I was at about eight books or seven books at that point. And he said, "And what are they about?" And the most recent one was about Eadweard Muybridge. It’s the father of motion pictures. It’s called River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. And he didn’t comment on that. He said, "Oh, have you heard about the very important Muybridge that just came out?" And he started doing what feminists, immediately after this essay came out, coined or defined as mansplaining—one of the great new words that’s helped us discuss what’s going on in the world. He started telling me about this very important book I should know about. And the woman I was with, my friend Sally, kept saying, "That’s her book." And he literally didn’t hear her until she had said it three or four times. So this man was telling me about this book I should know about, and it was a book I had written. And he was so full of himself, he literally couldn’t hear me, couldn’t hear her, didn’t ask questions first.

And that was incredibly funny, but it’s part of a slippery slope where men assume the right to talk over you, to not listen to you, to tell you how it’s going to be, to explain reality. What surprised me when I wrote that essay is that I started out with a pretty amusing incident, although one that’s indicative of sexism and a kind of conversational bullying, and I ended up talking about rapes and murders, the ways that women are literally silenced, deprived of their powers, etc. I think it’s important that we look at all this stuff together. It begins with these micro-aggressions; it ends with rape and murder and what Italian feminists call "femicide."

AARON MATÉ: On our show recently, we featured the voices of college women who have been fighting back against sexual assault, both the incident and then the inability—or the refusal of the schools to punish them. Your take on the way schools in this country have handled rape on campus?

REBECCASOLNIT: It’s been pretty damn pathetic in a whole lot of ways. One thing is that they tend to worry a lot more in many cases about the well-being of the perpetrators than the victims. Another thing is that they shifted responsibility for preventing rape from men not to rape to women to do all kinds of things to not get raped, which we don’t do with any other crime. And, you know—and then they haven’t pursued these things seriously. It’s also kind of crazy. It’s like, OK, if there’s petty vandalism on campus, maybe that’s a campus issue, but if there’s a felony crime that involves, you know, a woman being strangled, a woman being brutalized, why is that not turned over to the legal system, which is there to deal with those things, the idea that it’s an in-house incident? But what—you know, it’s been mishandled or overlooked, not handled at all, for decades, forever.

But what’s amazing is, because these young women rose up, they said, "This is not acceptable. This is not a legitimate way to deal with it." Because they used social media, their voices, the mainstream media, they’re organizing to say, "This has to stop. This has to change." They’re really radically changing how it’s being treated and exposing the universities—

AMYGOODMAN: Five seconds, Rebecca.

REBECCASOLNIT: —which are universities from California to Rhode Island, from Florida to Alaska, and saying, "This is going to change." And they are changing it. This is a very exciting time in feminism. I think that we’re shifting things profoundly.

AMYGOODMAN: Rebecca Solnit, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Her new book is called Men Explain Things to Me.

]]>
Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400One Billion Rising: Eve Ensler & Kimberle Crenshaw on Global Movement to End Violence Against Womenhttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/3/one_billion_rising_eve_ensler_kimberle
tag:democracynow.org,2014-02-03:en/story/8393f7 AMY GOODMAN : We end today&#8217;s show with this new worldwide movement that grew out of the global activist initiative called V-Day to stop violence against women and girls. One Billion Rising for Justice will take place on February 14th, Valentine&#8217;s Day, in more than 200 countries worldwide, focusing on the issue of justice for all survivors of gender violence and the impunity that protects perpetrators all over the world. The One Billion Rising campaign was launched by playwright Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues , and highlights the startling statistic that one in every three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. That&#8217;s over one billion women. The 2014 One Billion Rising events kicked off with the world premiere of this new short film called One Billion Rising at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
&gt;&gt; It&#8217;s a global movement today, so everyone is dancing all over the world.
It&#8217;s part of a global revolution.
In more than 205 countries today, people are rising.
I want to tell you: You are making history. This has never happened before in the world, where 200 countries have come together.
This thing that we are part of today has never happened in the history of the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, to talk more about the One Billion Rising for Justice campaign, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Eve Ensler herself, the award-winning playwright and creator of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the global movement to stop violence against women and girls, her new book, In the Body of the World , has just come out in paperback. And Kimberlé Crenshaw is with us, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, as well as a V-Day board member.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Eve, lay out what the plans are for February 14th.
EVE ENSLER : Well, this year, going off the energy and the mad movement of last year, the coordinators came together from all around the world and decided where they wanted to move was in the direction of justice, that we wanted to deepen the campaign and expand the campaign and really get very specific into the places where violence against women meets economic injustice, gender injustice, racial injustice, environmental injustice. So this year we already are, I think, past the number we had at this time last year. I think we&#8217;re up to 175 countries. Women and men are rising around the world to look at those intersections.
And some of the places, for example—some of the things that are happening are in the Philippines, for example. Indigenous women are rising in mines, where lands have been taken from them, where it&#8217;s increased poverty, it&#8217;s increased the militarization of the mines, which has increased sexual violence. Other places that are rising are in the Congo, for example, where they have—a war has been waging there for 13 years, 14 years, and they&#8217;ve seen no reparations and no justice. I mean, there are so many—
AMY GOODMAN : And what are the plans in the Congo for February 14th?
EVE ENSLER : There are going to be huge demonstrations and marches and dances through the streets, and then a concert is going to happen. And I really believe there is a set of demands that they are putting forward to the government looking at the time has come for reparations, and it&#8217;s very well organized, and I think it will be a very big rising. I was there last year, where about 10,000 people rose just in Bukavu alone. I think we&#8217;re seeing, very excitingly, in India, there are tribunals being held across, I think, 25 states. All the districts of Afghanistan are rising. The states—I think every state in America is rising. Thirteen hundred villages are rising in Bangladesh. And many women are rising to look at political crimes—prisoners in Bangladesh, who were held without justice there, and calling for justice for them. I think—
AMY GOODMAN : Kimberlé, can you talk more about what&#8217;s happening in the United States, the organizing that&#8217;s going on here?
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW : Well, what&#8217;s so exciting about what&#8217;s going on in the United States is that it&#8217;s finally linking many of the movements around domestic violence and violence against women, in general, to a global understanding that these are risks that women face around the world as a group. One of the problems so far, or at least historically, with the domestic violence movement and violence against women, in general, is that many times people didn&#8217;t perceive that they were linked. So, there would be an anti-incarceration movement, for example, that wouldn&#8217;t necessarily see the links between having experienced domestic violence or other forms of abuse and that being a start or a pathway into incarceration, or vice versa.
So what&#8217;s happening here is that women are putting their bodies at the site where vulnerabilities intersect. By that, I mean where vulnerability to gender violence, vulnerability to economic exploitation, vulnerability to the drug war—all these things come together to create unique risks, many times risks that poor woman, marginalized women, women of color face. So the idea is that if you—if you basically decentralize, if you encourage women to put their bodies, literally, at the sites where they are not safe and should be, or where they&#8217;re not experiencing justice and they have a right to expect that, if you put them in motion and allow them to articulate the ways in which all of these vulnerabilities actually constitute the conditions of their lives, then that makes for a national movement, and it links it to a global movement.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you explain the issue of intersectionality?
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW : Well, I can explain it with an example. If you just look at President Obama&#8217;s State of the Union address, there&#8217;s a great example there. In one sentence, he talks about the economic marginality of men of color and the need to have programs at the foundation level to address them, and in the next paragraph, he talks about the economic marginality of women. But if you were to really ask where do women of color show up, women of color make—African-American women of color make 66 cents for a dollar that a white man makes, Latinas 56 cents. You didn&#8217;t hear that when he talked about women, and you didn&#8217;t hear it when he talked about men of color. You wouldn&#8217;t know African-American women, their median net worth is a hundred dollars. That means that they experience all sorts of risks that actually lead to violence, and their ability to handle violence when it happens is compromised.
So intersectionality draws attention to the fact that women of color are caught between race, gender, class, and most of the time, the ways in which they&#8217;re vulnerable is not discussed. So what&#8217;s beautiful about this movement, it allows women to discuss it. Our State of Female Justice events, we had one in New York. We&#8217;re having one at UCLA on Thursday. It allows all these issues to come to the fore.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re heading out today to California.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : If you can make it out of the slush and the snow that&#8217;s coming down here.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW : If we&#8217;re lucky.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain what these State of Justice panels are.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW : So, we might draw an analogy to what happened during the civil rights movement. There was the daily action that put bodies in the street, and then there was what they did at night. They came together. They talked about the issues. They drew examples from each other. And they built community. Well, that&#8217;s what the State of Female Justice panels do. We&#8217;ve had several here in the United States, but they&#8217;ve also gone on around the world. It creates the common language, so that even though women experience vulnerability differently, we&#8217;re able to see how the issues are connected.
AMY GOODMAN : Eve, your book, In the Body of the World , is now coming out in paperback this week. How does this relate to One Billion Rising?
EVE ENSLER : Well, I think so much of what we&#8217;re talking about is the body, right? And the body of women, the body of the Earth, the body of justice, and so many sites this year—and what is this action? It&#8217;s an action of dance. It&#8217;s an action of re-inhabiting your body. It&#8217;s an action of reclaiming public space with your body, which has been taken away from you through various forms of violence. And it&#8217;s so beautiful to look at all the videos and all the posters that are coming around the world, because bodies are such an intrinsic part of what this movement&#8217;s about.
And we&#8217;re seeing people dancing in places where they never felt free to dance. You know, in the Philippines, for example, every day this month they are doing an action in front of the Payatas, in front of the hospitals to demand the end of privatization of medicine and healthcare. They&#8217;re dancing in front of courthouses.
And I think there&#8217;s something about when trauma and violence happens to your body, we leave our bodies. We leave the center of our power, the center of our creativity, the center of our resource. And dancing, and also collective dancing, brings us back into our central energy and power. My book is a lot about cancer and Congo and the coming together of those two things, because—
AMY GOODMAN : You survived cancer.
EVE ENSLER : I did, and I&#8217;m really happy to be here. And I think, when we can transform and re-enter our bodies, we can really begin, as women and women collectively, to have a vision of what—and feel what&#8217;s going on and connect with what&#8217;s going on and know we&#8217;re part of the story. And I&#8217;ve heard from so many women last year who danced publicly, they hadn&#8217;t danced in public space ever, they never felt it was theirs, they never felt safe enough, but with the community and with a direct intention to reclaim that space and make it safe for women, they came back into their bodies.
AMY GOODMAN : What is happening in India with this—for the first time in the last year, the kind of attention that&#8217;s being paid to gang rape?
EVE ENSLER : Well, I have to say, I was there for three weeks in December, and it&#8217;s—I think it&#8217;s remarkable what&#8217;s going on in India. There is this unearthing of the truth, unearthing of the story. I was just on the phone last night with activists in India, and I think one of the best things about One Billion Rising for Justice is it&#8217;s owned, it&#8217;s self-directed, it&#8217;s determined by people on the ground. Actually, everybody owns this movement. There&#8217;s no kind of central point of ownership. It&#8217;s if you want to do it, go and do it. And they were saying to me, right now in India, it looks like probably all states are rising. They were talking about this beautiful action that&#8217;s gone on where rickshaw drivers have been sensitized so that 100,000 rickshaw drivers now have on their rickshaws, &quot;My religion is respecting women.&quot; So there are all these beautiful initiatives that are happening, by men and women. But I think India in some ways is the epicenter of this movement right now. There is just this—
AMY GOODMAN : We have 20 seconds.
EVE ENSLER : —wonderful energy that&#8217;s emerging there.
AMY GOODMAN : And if people want to find more about how to connect to this movement on Valentine&#8217;s Day, February 14th?
EVE ENSLER : OneBillionRising.org . There&#8217;s a huge—there are lots of actions in New York, in Atlanta at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King, you know, led the way. They&#8217;re joining forces there with the women&#8217;s movements and the civil rights movements. And you can go on and sign up, do your own action or join one of the big actions in your neighborhood.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the founder of the African American Policy Forum, for joining us. AMYGOODMAN: We end today’s show with this new worldwide movement that grew out of the global activist initiative called V-Day to stop violence against women and girls. One Billion Rising for Justice will take place on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, in more than 200 countries worldwide, focusing on the issue of justice for all survivors of gender violence and the impunity that protects perpetrators all over the world. The One Billion Rising campaign was launched by playwright Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues, and highlights the startling statistic that one in every three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. That’s over one billion women. The 2014 One Billion Rising events kicked off with the world premiere of this new short film called One Billion Rising at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

>> It’s a global movement today, so everyone is dancing all over the world.

It’s part of a global revolution.

In more than 205 countries today, people are rising.

I want to tell you: You are making history. This has never happened before in the world, where 200 countries have come together.

This thing that we are part of today has never happened in the history of the world.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, to talk more about the One Billion Rising for Justice campaign, we’re joined by two guests. Eve Ensler herself, the award-winning playwright and creator of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the global movement to stop violence against women and girls, her new book, In the Body of the World, has just come out in paperback. And Kimberlé Crenshaw is with us, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, as well as a V-Day board member.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Eve, lay out what the plans are for February 14th.

EVEENSLER: Well, this year, going off the energy and the mad movement of last year, the coordinators came together from all around the world and decided where they wanted to move was in the direction of justice, that we wanted to deepen the campaign and expand the campaign and really get very specific into the places where violence against women meets economic injustice, gender injustice, racial injustice, environmental injustice. So this year we already are, I think, past the number we had at this time last year. I think we’re up to 175 countries. Women and men are rising around the world to look at those intersections.

And some of the places, for example—some of the things that are happening are in the Philippines, for example. Indigenous women are rising in mines, where lands have been taken from them, where it’s increased poverty, it’s increased the militarization of the mines, which has increased sexual violence. Other places that are rising are in the Congo, for example, where they have—a war has been waging there for 13 years, 14 years, and they’ve seen no reparations and no justice. I mean, there are so many—

AMYGOODMAN: And what are the plans in the Congo for February 14th?

EVEENSLER: There are going to be huge demonstrations and marches and dances through the streets, and then a concert is going to happen. And I really believe there is a set of demands that they are putting forward to the government looking at the time has come for reparations, and it’s very well organized, and I think it will be a very big rising. I was there last year, where about 10,000 people rose just in Bukavu alone. I think we’re seeing, very excitingly, in India, there are tribunals being held across, I think, 25 states. All the districts of Afghanistan are rising. The states—I think every state in America is rising. Thirteen hundred villages are rising in Bangladesh. And many women are rising to look at political crimes—prisoners in Bangladesh, who were held without justice there, and calling for justice for them. I think—

AMYGOODMAN: Kimberlé, can you talk more about what’s happening in the United States, the organizing that’s going on here?

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, what’s so exciting about what’s going on in the United States is that it’s finally linking many of the movements around domestic violence and violence against women, in general, to a global understanding that these are risks that women face around the world as a group. One of the problems so far, or at least historically, with the domestic violence movement and violence against women, in general, is that many times people didn’t perceive that they were linked. So, there would be an anti-incarceration movement, for example, that wouldn’t necessarily see the links between having experienced domestic violence or other forms of abuse and that being a start or a pathway into incarceration, or vice versa.

So what’s happening here is that women are putting their bodies at the site where vulnerabilities intersect. By that, I mean where vulnerability to gender violence, vulnerability to economic exploitation, vulnerability to the drug war—all these things come together to create unique risks, many times risks that poor woman, marginalized women, women of color face. So the idea is that if you—if you basically decentralize, if you encourage women to put their bodies, literally, at the sites where they are not safe and should be, or where they’re not experiencing justice and they have a right to expect that, if you put them in motion and allow them to articulate the ways in which all of these vulnerabilities actually constitute the conditions of their lives, then that makes for a national movement, and it links it to a global movement.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you explain the issue of intersectionality?

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, I can explain it with an example. If you just look at President Obama’s State of the Union address, there’s a great example there. In one sentence, he talks about the economic marginality of men of color and the need to have programs at the foundation level to address them, and in the next paragraph, he talks about the economic marginality of women. But if you were to really ask where do women of color show up, women of color make—African-American women of color make 66 cents for a dollar that a white man makes, Latinas 56 cents. You didn’t hear that when he talked about women, and you didn’t hear it when he talked about men of color. You wouldn’t know African-American women, their median net worth is a hundred dollars. That means that they experience all sorts of risks that actually lead to violence, and their ability to handle violence when it happens is compromised.

So intersectionality draws attention to the fact that women of color are caught between race, gender, class, and most of the time, the ways in which they’re vulnerable is not discussed. So what’s beautiful about this movement, it allows women to discuss it. Our State of Female Justice events, we had one in New York. We’re having one at UCLA on Thursday. It allows all these issues to come to the fore.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re heading out today to California.

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: If you can make it out of the slush and the snow that’s coming down here.

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: If we’re lucky.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain what these State of Justice panels are.

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: So, we might draw an analogy to what happened during the civil rights movement. There was the daily action that put bodies in the street, and then there was what they did at night. They came together. They talked about the issues. They drew examples from each other. And they built community. Well, that’s what the State of Female Justice panels do. We’ve had several here in the United States, but they’ve also gone on around the world. It creates the common language, so that even though women experience vulnerability differently, we’re able to see how the issues are connected.

AMYGOODMAN: Eve, your book, In the Body of the World, is now coming out in paperback this week. How does this relate to One Billion Rising?

EVEENSLER: Well, I think so much of what we’re talking about is the body, right? And the body of women, the body of the Earth, the body of justice, and so many sites this year—and what is this action? It’s an action of dance. It’s an action of re-inhabiting your body. It’s an action of reclaiming public space with your body, which has been taken away from you through various forms of violence. And it’s so beautiful to look at all the videos and all the posters that are coming around the world, because bodies are such an intrinsic part of what this movement’s about.

And we’re seeing people dancing in places where they never felt free to dance. You know, in the Philippines, for example, every day this month they are doing an action in front of the Payatas, in front of the hospitals to demand the end of privatization of medicine and healthcare. They’re dancing in front of courthouses.

And I think there’s something about when trauma and violence happens to your body, we leave our bodies. We leave the center of our power, the center of our creativity, the center of our resource. And dancing, and also collective dancing, brings us back into our central energy and power. My book is a lot about cancer and Congo and the coming together of those two things, because—

AMYGOODMAN: You survived cancer.

EVEENSLER: I did, and I’m really happy to be here. And I think, when we can transform and re-enter our bodies, we can really begin, as women and women collectively, to have a vision of what—and feel what’s going on and connect with what’s going on and know we’re part of the story. And I’ve heard from so many women last year who danced publicly, they hadn’t danced in public space ever, they never felt it was theirs, they never felt safe enough, but with the community and with a direct intention to reclaim that space and make it safe for women, they came back into their bodies.

AMYGOODMAN: What is happening in India with this—for the first time in the last year, the kind of attention that’s being paid to gang rape?

EVEENSLER: Well, I have to say, I was there for three weeks in December, and it’s—I think it’s remarkable what’s going on in India. There is this unearthing of the truth, unearthing of the story. I was just on the phone last night with activists in India, and I think one of the best things about One Billion Rising for Justice is it’s owned, it’s self-directed, it’s determined by people on the ground. Actually, everybody owns this movement. There’s no kind of central point of ownership. It’s if you want to do it, go and do it. And they were saying to me, right now in India, it looks like probably all states are rising. They were talking about this beautiful action that’s gone on where rickshaw drivers have been sensitized so that 100,000 rickshaw drivers now have on their rickshaws, "My religion is respecting women." So there are all these beautiful initiatives that are happening, by men and women. But I think India in some ways is the epicenter of this movement right now. There is just this—

AMYGOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

EVEENSLER: —wonderful energy that’s emerging there.

AMYGOODMAN: And if people want to find more about how to connect to this movement on Valentine’s Day, February 14th?

EVEENSLER:OneBillionRising.org. There’s a huge—there are lots of actions in New York, in Atlanta at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King, you know, led the way. They’re joining forces there with the women’s movements and the civil rights movements. And you can go on and sign up, do your own action or join one of the big actions in your neighborhood.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the founder of the African American Policy Forum, for joining us.

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Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500Private Violence: Survivors & Advocates Confront Victim Blaming & the Epidemic of Domestic Abusehttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/22/private_violence_survivors_advocates_confront_victim
tag:democracynow.org,2014-01-22:en/story/031328 AMY GOODMAN : Yes, this is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report . We are in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival following the documentary track, dealing with the critical issues of the day.
BRIAN CARLSON , ABC 4 Utah: It&#8217;s believed a Lindon police officer shot and killed his entire family. Today five people were found dead in his Spanish Fork home, including the officer and his two children, just five and seven years old.
BOB EVANS , FOX 13: Authorities say Lindon police officer Joshua Boren shot and killed his mother-in-law, wife and two young children before turning the gun on himself.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s actually not a clip from a documentary; it happened last week here in Utah as the Sundance Film Festival got underway.
Back home in New York City, a 21-year-old woman and her two daughters, ages two and one, were found stabbed to death over the weekend. The victim&#8217;s husband has been arrested in Texas. Police had reportedly investigated two incidents of domestic violence at their home this year.
The list of such tragedies is long, but they are often not named for what they are: part of an epidemic of intimate partner violence. In fact, there&#8217;s a documentary here at Sundance that deals with that very issue. It&#8217;s called Private Violence , and it highlights the struggles of survivors and the advocates who support them. Set in North Carolina and directed by Cynthia Hill, the film follows advocate Kit Gruelle, who is herself a domestic violence survivor. This is a trailer. A warning that this is footage that&#8217;s disturbing.
KIT GRUELLE : I do this work because I survived a really violent relationship, and it took me getting into this work and understanding it to really see that it&#8217;s just so widespread.
DEANNA WALTERS : This last time, he almost killed me in front of my daughter.
KIT GRUELLE : But what happened to you shouldn&#8217;t happen to anybody ever.
DEANNA WALTERS : I know. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m here.
KIT GRUELLE : What do your parents have to say about it?
DEANNA WALTERS : &quot;Why didn&#8217;t you just leave?&quot;
KIT GRUELLE : Did he ever threaten to kill you?
DEANNA WALTERS : Yeah, lots of times.
UNIDENTIFIED : She is still living, correct?
KIT GRUELLE : She&#8217;s still alive. The local prosecutor, he declined to prosecute because, he says, she should have tried to get away from him.
If he was convicted only of misdemeanor assault on a female, what would he be looking at as far as time?
PROSECUTOR : The most he could receive is 150 days in jail.
UNIDENTIFIED : The daughter and Deanna were back in the cab part of the truck. He just started beating on her.
DEANNA WALTERS : Martina asked him over and over, &quot;Why are you doing it? Why are you hurting my mama?&quot;
UNIDENTIFIED : Once he got back to North Carolina, he was interviewed by law enforcement and admitted to beating her so badly that he almost broke his fingers.
ADVOCATE : As an advocate, there were so many injustices that I felt like happened with her. Martina was removed from Deanna. That really angered me.
KIT GRUELLE : What was it like when they came and took Martina?
DEANNA WALTERS : It destroyed me. She still asks me why I gave her away.
KIT GRUELLE : So she remembers it.
DEANNA WALTERS : Yeah.
KIT GRUELLE : Our criminal justice system requires she be beaten enough to satisfy the system. And by the time it gets to that point, she&#8217;s already been so worn down psychologically and physically and emotionally. You know, the courts have told her that she doesn&#8217;t have value, and her partner has told her that she doesn&#8217;t have value. Perhaps family and friends have done that through their actions with her. &quot;Why don&#8217;t you just leave him? Why are you staying with him?&quot; That&#8217;s when it&#8217;s really time for advocates to really step up.
Luckily, the feds picked up the case, and it&#8217;s going to be prosecuted under the federal Violence Against Women Act. If he doesn&#8217;t go to prison, he will turn around immediately and start to hurt women again.
UNIDENTIFIED : If we weren&#8217;t going to do anything, then maybe nothing was going to be done. And something had to be done.
DEANNA WALTERS : I&#8217;m not going to let him get away with what he&#8217;d done to me, my daughters. Nobody should get away with this. Nobody.
KIT GRUELLE : I&#8217;m always so astonished and moved at the people who want to come into this movement and do this work, because it&#8217;s not easy work. It can be heartbreaking and frustrating. But it can also be unbelievably uplifting. You witness victims shedding that skin and just leaving the violence behind.
AMY GOODMAN : The HBO documentary film, Private Violence , is currently at the Sundance Film Festival. I sat down Tuesday with the film&#8217;s director, Cynthia Lynch, and advocate Kit Gruelle. I started by asking Kit to talk about her own story.
KIT GRUELLE : I survived a very violent marriage that ended with the death of my husband 34 years ago. And he was killed in an accident offshore in Louisiana, and it just was—the whole experience was so astonishing, and it took a long time for me to start to pull myself together. But then I took my boys and moved down from the mountains to the Chapel Hill area, and I saw an ad for a training opportunity for crisis line volunteers for the domestic violence program. And I went to the training, and I felt like I had just been—that I had found my emotional home, my spiritual home, my intellectual home. And it just fit with my personality type, because I feel very strongly—I&#8217;m a human rights activist, but, to me, this is so essential because if you can&#8217;t be safe in your own home, then where can you be safe? And then, because of my own experience, I just recognized that it wasn&#8217;t just the abuser that the victim had to deal with, it was also these oppressive systems who would marginalize her and judge her and stigmatize her and make her feel like she was doing something wrong. And so, I wanted to challenge that, too.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you tell us your story, when you talk about being a victim of domestic violence? I think what happens is, people just say that phrase, and then other women who go through it think, &quot;Well, I&quot;—if it&#8217;s not described, they think, &quot;That—I can&#8217;t be going through what they call domestic violence.&quot;
KIT GRUELLE : Well, I&#8217;m glad you asked that question, because a lot of people believe that domestic violence only happens to poor, uneducated women. In my case, my late husband had been—he had gone into Vietnam, gone to the Vietnam War as a marine, and so he was trained by the Marines to be aggressive, to hunt people down and kill them. And he told me repeatedly that if I ever tried to leave, that there wasn&#8217;t a place on the planet that I could go to get away from him.
And so, the reality for battered women is they just learn to live with the violence, because, unfortunately, for a great number of women, when they do make that bold move, what I often refer to as a declaration of independence, and say, &quot;I can&#8217;t live like this anymore. The children can&#8217;t live like this anymore. We&#8217;ve got to go,&quot; then the abusers oftentimes hunt them down and kill them. And so, for us, as advocates, we see women have to make the choice of staying and living with the violence or leaving and running the risk of being killed. And we just believe that there should be a lot more options, and that&#8217;s what advocates work towards.
The other thing is that we&#8217;re so desensitized to violence in the United States that oftentimes women have to be beaten badly enough before our criminal justice system responds, like, for example, in North Carolina we have a charge called misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon. So a North Carolina man can shoot or stab his wife or girlfriend, and unless it involves a serious injury or a life-threatening injury, it&#8217;s going to be charged at the misdemeanor level. And so, essentially what that is is that&#8217;s just the criminal justice system giving him a green light to just carry on.
AMY GOODMAN : In your case, how did you cope with your children coping with the violence? And what did your husband do to you?
KIT GRUELLE : He—the thing that he liked to do most was strangle me. I think he liked knowing that he had my life in his hands. And he—you know, he put his hands around my neck and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. And, you know, I&#8217;m not going to use the language that he would use, but he&#8217;d say, &quot;I could break your blanking neck if I wanted to.&quot;
And then there were the things that I refer to as the minutia. He was trying to gain muscle weight. He was a bodybuilder, and he wanted a lot of calories that were protein calories. And so, he wanted—every night he&#8217;d have a bowl of ice cream, and on the ice cream he wanted peanuts because, he said, the peanuts were so high in protein. But when I went to the grocery store—and he didn&#8217;t want the—he didn&#8217;t want salt on the peanuts because, he said, the salt would cause him to retain fluid. But when I went to the grocery store, I had to buy salted peanuts, bring them home, rinse them off in the colander, pat them dry, put them on the ice cream. And then, if he came across salt on his peanuts on the ice cream, then he&#8217;d come after me because, he said, I didn&#8217;t do a good enough job washing the peanuts. And so, one of the things that&#8217;s so important is that I couldn&#8217;t call law enforcement and say, &quot;I&#8217;m terrorized by husband because I don&#8217;t do a good enough job washing the peanuts.&quot; They&#8217;d laugh at that.
But the reality of it is, is the anger is only a tactic. What it&#8217;s about is control. What it&#8217;s about is seeing the woman, the wife or girlfriend, as personal property to do with as the abuser pleases. That was certainly the case with my husband, as he just treated me like I was his private property to do with as he pleased.
AMY GOODMAN : And how did the kids deal with it?
KIT GRUELLE : Well, Jason, our son, was only 14 months old when his dad died, so he didn&#8217;t—he didn&#8217;t see anything. And Matt, my older son, I don&#8217;t think he remembers much, because he was only four when Jack died. But it&#8217;s been—it&#8217;s been interesting for me as a single mom raising boys, wanting very much for them to grow up knowing how to relate to women in respectful and nonviolent ways. And there were challenges along the way, because there&#8217;s a lot of external, you know, misogynistic reinforcers. But I had them at Friends School for a while, and they&#8217;ve grown up to be two pretty great guys.
AMY GOODMAN : Kit Gruelle, a domestic violence survivor, who&#8217;s been an advocate for other survivors for 30 years. Her story is featured in the new documentary, Private Violence , which premiered here at Sundance this week. We&#8217;ll return to our conversation with Kit, as well as the film&#8217;s director, Cynthia Hill, after break.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. We&#8217;re in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival, where a new film just premiered called Private Violence . It airs on HBO later this year. I sat down Tuesday with the film&#8217;s director, Cynthia Hill, and its main subject, domestic violence survivor, advocate, Kit Gruelle. We&#8217;ll return to that interview in a moment, but first, this is a clip from the film where Kit seeks advice from a prosecutor about the case of a woman named Deanna Walters.
PROSECUTOR : Yes, ma&#8217;am. What&#8217;s up?
KIT GRUELLE : So, I want to talk with you a little bit about this case up in Ashe County involving a woman who was kidnapped, pretty severe beating.
PROSECUTOR : And when you say kidnapped, do you mean—
KIT GRUELLE : Kidnapped.
PROSECUTOR : OK, held against her will.
KIT GRUELLE : Held against her will, she and her daughter.
PROSECUTOR : Transported.
KIT GRUELLE : She and her daughter taken out of the—out of the state, driven all the way to California and halfway back, and the truck was stopped in Oklahoma. This was an 18-wheeler.
PROSECUTOR : OK.
KIT GRUELLE : And he beat her for four-and-a-half days.
PROSECUTOR : What kind of injuries did she have? Holy crap!
KIT GRUELLE : So, this is the injuries.
PROSECUTOR : What did he use?
KIT GRUELLE : His fist, a Maglite flashlight. He bit her.
PROSECUTOR : Any internal injuries? Or is it all—is it all tissue injury, soft tissue injury?
KIT GRUELLE : Well, he also strangled her.
PROSECUTOR : OK. Do we have any medical doctor who&#8217;s going to say these are serious injuries? Because, you know, in state court, that&#8217;s the tough part, is when we&#8217;re talking about soft tissue injuries, when you don&#8217;t have damage to the spleen, internal injuries, or cuts that require stitches. Concussions can be serious injury.
KIT GRUELLE : The local prosecutor called this a misdemeanor assault.
PROSECUTOR : OK. No.
KIT GRUELLE : Yes.
PROSECUTOR : OK, no. I would push felony charges probably for kidnapping. If it&#8217;s a Maglite, a Maglite&#8217;s a deadly weapon—assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. It&#8217;s all about getting a medical doctor to say on the stand, &quot;Yes, this is serious injury.&quot; Is it serious bodily injury? Sure. Is it protracted pain and suffering that she has suffered? Yeah, I think so. But even if we succeed on all levels, what I&#8217;m telling you, Kit, is that you may not be satisfied with the amount of time that they&#8217;re going to get at the state level.
KIT GRUELLE : If he was convicted only of misdemeanor assault on a female, even with doing this—
PROSECUTOR : Yeah.
KIT GRUELLE : —what would he be looking at as far as time?
PROSECUTOR : The most he could receive is 150 days in jail.
KIT GRUELLE : A hundred and fifty days in jail for this.
PROSECUTOR : That&#8217;s it. So, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m saying. You have a clear case where he&#8217;s transporting a woman across state lines for the purpose of terrorizing and assaulting her. That is a federal case all over. And so, what we need to do, or what you need to do, since it&#8217;s not, you know, in my county, is really push and talk to the federal prosecutor in that area, in that district, which would be the Western District, and say this is the case, and get them interested in it. I think they will be.
KIT GRUELLE : Mm-hmm.
PROSECUTOR : I think they will be.
KIT GRUELLE : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So that&#8217;s a clip from the film Private Violence , astounding conversation you have with the prosecutor. Can you tell us who Deanna Walters is, who her abuser was, what happened?
KIT GRUELLE : Deanna Walters is a woman from the mountains of North Carolina, from West Jefferson. She was attempting to separate from her husband, and he wound up kidnapping her and their daughter, and putting them in an 18-wheeler. He had his cousin drive. And as they left North Carolina and drove all the way out to California and halfway back to Oklahoma, Robbie beat Deanna and strangled Deanna and kicked Deanna and urinated in her face and beat her with a Maglite flashlight and almost killed her. And she survived. When the truck was stopped in Oklahoma, she was taken to the local hospital.
AMY GOODMAN : And it was stopped because—explain how the police were alerted.
KIT GRUELLE : It was only stopped because Deanna—Robbie put Deanna on the phone with people that he was paranoid that she was having affairs with, which was baloney. She wasn&#8217;t—you know, she wasn&#8217;t doing that at all. And because of her robotic sort of approach to having these conversations, they became concerned that something was happening. They called the trucking company. The trucking company realized that he had unauthorized riders in the cab, and the truck was pulled over in Oklahoma.
And Deanna got out of the cab looking like this—just like she had been in the worst car accident possible. I mean, her face was smashed in. She had petechial hemorrhage in her eyes, which is the first symptom of acute strangulation assaults. Her body was bruised from, you know, the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Her knees were grotesquely swollen where he had beaten her with a Maglite flashlight, I think, so that she couldn&#8217;t run. And—
AMY GOODMAN : Her daughter watched this?
KIT GRUELLE : Her daughter witnessed everything.
AMY GOODMAN : Her daughter was how old?
KIT GRUELLE : Deanna was three or four at the time.
CYNTHIA HILL : Martina.
KIT GRUELLE : And she witnessed everything.
AMY GOODMAN : Her daughter.
KIT GRUELLE : Yeah, Martina. And Martina was just screaming and screaming over and over again, &quot;Why are you doing this to my mom? Why are you doing this to my mom?&quot; And Robbie would say things to Martina like, &quot;I&#8217;m doing this because your mother doesn&#8217;t love us, so it&#8217;s OK for me to do this.&quot; And Deanna had had a seizure disorder that had been in check, but after the blows to the head, her seizure disorder has now started back up again, so she&#8217;s on medication for that.
And yet, when she got back to North Carolina, the local prosecutor, his first question to her was: &quot;Why didn&#8217;t you try to run?&quot; And, you know, there are a thousand reasons why she didn&#8217;t try to run. Robbie said that if she tried to run, he&#8217;d kill Martina. She didn&#8217;t know where she was. She was hideously beaten. She was being threatened with her life. She was afraid that if she ran or tried to run, he&#8217;d kill her, and she didn&#8217;t know what would happen to Martina. So, this is why we have to stop asking women, &quot;Why don&#8217;t you just leave?&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : And there was another problem: The question of where she was beaten would determine whether he was charged and where he would be charged—
KIT GRUELLE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : —given that he was crossing state lines.
KIT GRUELLE : Right, right. Well, he kidnapped her in North Carolina, but the local prosecutor seemed unimpressed with her injuries. In fact, when Robbie did come back from Oklahoma, he told the local law enforcement officers that he beat her so bad that he thought he broke his fingers. And yet they still only charged him with misdemeanor assault on a female.
AMY GOODMAN : They left him on the roadside, the police—
KIT GRUELLE : Mm-hmm, right.
AMY GOODMAN : —because he had her say that she was—he was saving her from a beating by someone else, and that&#8217;s why she was in the truck.
KIT GRUELLE : And he also told her not to say that he&#8217;d done this. So, as long as Robbie was within earshot, of course she was going to say what she&#8217;d been instructed to say. But the minute she was able to say, &quot;No, he did this to me,&quot; by then he was gone—
CYNTHIA HILL : Yeah, [inaudible].
KIT GRUELLE : —hitchhiking back to North Carolina.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Cynthia Hill, as you followed this story as a filmmaker, as it unfolds, and you were doing it as it unfolds—
CYNTHIA HILL : Yes, mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : So you didn&#8217;t know the final outcome.
CYNTHIA HILL : No. When we first met Deanna, it was just a few months after the incident had actually happened, and she was so distraught thinking that nothing was going to come of this and that he was not going to be held accountable for anything. And she just was—I don&#8217;t know. She just—and you can see this in the film. She just is—she seems hopeless, like, &quot;I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m going to do, and I&#8217;m just going to have to live with this.&quot;
But what&#8217;s amazing about having this story and this trajectory and watching this process of seeking justice and the feds finally picking up the case and him actually going to prison for almost 21 years, and seeing Deanna transform from victim to survivor is pretty spectacular. You know, I don&#8217;t think—I mean, it&#8217;s one thing that I have never seen in a film, or a documentary film, actually being able to see physically her transformation.
AMY GOODMAN : The horrific injuries she suffered, the police that found her said they hadn&#8217;t seen injuries like that even in car accidents, when they dragged people out, from head to toe.
CYNTHIA HILL : Yeah, there&#8217;s this one image of her laying on the hospital bed, and she looks like a corpse. It looks like she&#8217;s dead. She just is so bruised. And you just cannot imagine somebody actually experiencing all of this, in the way she looks, and still be alive.
AMY GOODMAN : But unlike in many cases, he is convicted. He is sentenced. Talk about that sentence.
KIT GRUELLE : Yeah, and he got—we were thrilled at the sentence that he got, because it shows the difference between the federal prosecution, where he got a 21-year-plus sentence, and in North Carolina the most he would have gotten is 150 days. So, it just shows the stark contrast.
AMY GOODMAN : And it was 150 days he would have gotten because? That&#8217;s 150 days, is 30 times four—30 times five is five months.
KIT GRUELLE : Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, for beating her like he did.
AMY GOODMAN : Almost to death. This is attempted murder.
KIT GRUELLE : Mm-hmm, it should have been charged as attempted murder, right. But because of the kind of inherent patriarchy in our criminal justice system and because there are many laws that still regard women as less than or as the property of their husbands, because that&#8217;s the reality of how it plays out—I mean, we do have good laws on the books in some states, but how do those laws get translated? And what does it mean for someone like Deanna to be beaten that badly by her husband and then to have the person who&#8217;s in charge of holding him accountable for what he did look at her and say, &quot;Why didn&#8217;t you run?&quot; It&#8217;s just a completely upside-down and backwards way to approach this very private violence, that ultimately plays itself out in public ways, because when kids grow up exposed to domestic violence, they tend to not do well in school. Oftentimes they wind up running away. Girls get pregnant early. Boys become violent themselves. They join gangs. So, I refer to domestic violence as kind of the Petri dish for all of the other social issues that we ultimately pay for.
AMY GOODMAN : Having worked in a domestic violence shelter, battered women&#8217;s shelter myself, I know another issue is dealing with the police, and that&#8217;s dealt with very well in this film. You actually train police in how not to abet the abuser. What is the accepted wisdom now on what to do when a cop is called into a domestic violence situation, which is probably the most violent situation overall? Domestic violence cases are the most violent and threatening for police officers of any situation, which most people might not know.
KIT GRUELLE : Well, one of the things that has happened, thanks to the Violence Against Women Act, is that there has been a lot of law enforcement training. And part of what they look at now is who&#8217;s the dominant aggressor. And so, they&#8217;ve been trained in looking at offensive versus defensive injuries. They do a much, much more comprehensive and thorough job gathering evidence, talking to other people, talking to neighbors. And as a result, I think that a majority of law enforcement officers around the country now see domestic violence as an actual crime, and they treat it like a crime.
But unfortunately, in many pockets around the country, it&#8217;s still not considered criminal conduct. And so, for me, as someone who works very closely with law enforcement in North Carolina and also in California, I just hope that in the next months, years, decades, that we can really start to focus on this crime and deal more appropriately early on with the offender rather than blaming her for what he&#8217;s done.
AMY GOODMAN : In California, you train hostage negotiators because of your experience with women as hostages in domestic violence situations?
KIT GRUELLE : Well, part of what we&#8217;re trying to get the negotiators to understand is that battered women are what we refer to as benign hostages. And what we mean by that is that they—you know, they wake up every morning, and their abuser gives them a set of rules and regulations that they have to live by. And if they don&#8217;t abide by those terms and conditions strictly, then there are consequences—you know, physical violence, sexual violence, coercion, intimidation.
And 80 percent of the hostage-taking incidents every year in this country are domestic-violence-related. Most people think it&#8217;s about banks, but it&#8217;s not. It&#8217;s almost always where, you know, the woman has done what everyone has told her to do. She&#8217;s left. She&#8217;s got an order of protection. She&#8217;s drawn a line in the sand. And yet, he says to her and to the court system and everyone else, &quot;You&#8217;re not—no, you&#8217;re not walking away from me.&quot; And he goes over and barricades in, and then the hostage negotiators are called out.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, aren&#8217;t many mass shootings—
KIT GRUELLE : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : —when you actually read the article or listen carefully to the story, have to do with a man going after a woman in some situation, or her family or friends or the children?
KIT GRUELLE : In fact, it just happened here in Utah last week. Right as we got here, there was a police officer who shot and killed his wife, his two children, his mother-in-law and then himself. And what I&#8217;ve heard from the domestic violence community around here, she had separated from him, and then they reconciled at the holidays. But it sounds like she probably had decided that it wasn&#8217;t going to work and was about to leave. And for many battered women, that&#8217;s the most dangerous time for them.
AMY GOODMAN : Cynthia, what are you hoping to do with this film? It is not an easy film. And so, it probably had something to do with you making your decision about whether—I mean, on the one hand, it&#8217;s such an important subject, but how are you going to get support for it, get audiences for it?
CYNTHIA HILL : Mm-hmm. Well, just to step back, I think the—what we really want to happen with the film, or what we want audiences to walk away with, is to not ask that question anymore of &quot;Why doesn&#8217;t she just leave?&quot; because it&#8217;s clear, after watching this film, that you cannot ask that question and expect to get any results that are meaningful. I mean, all it does is just blame the victim for the whole situation without putting any sort of responsibility on the perpetrator at all. And then, also, as society, you know, we need to understand that we do play a role in this.
AMY GOODMAN : You have an astounding moment in the film where a woman has killed her abuser, and the comment that these women, who are so violated, actually feel safer in prison than they do so-called free.
KIT GRUELLE : Every woman that I&#8217;ve ever worked with who has killed her abuser, when she goes into the prison system, she says, &quot;I&#8217;ve never felt this safe.&quot; And it just—it just blows my mind that this is—you know, this is the United States of America. And for battered women who turn to the criminal justice system, like Deanna did, only to be told, &quot;Your injuries don&#8217;t satisfy me as being serious enough to do anything with it,&quot; and then it continues to happen, or she decides, &quot;I&#8217;m not going to call 911, because what&#8217;s the point?&quot; And then she has to take matters into her own hands, and then she goes to prison and says, &quot;Well, this is the safest I&#8217;ve ever felt.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Kit, you&#8217;ve done this work for decades now. What gives you hope? Do you see improvement in how domestic violence is dealt with?
KIT GRUELLE : Well, I mean, it&#8217;s a privilege to be a part of this opportunity to train law enforcement officers in North Carolina and in California. I have to say California is very forward-thinking about this crime, so that gives me hope. We still have a long ways to go, and it&#8217;s not exclusive to the criminal justice community. I think that everyone has to understand that when they look away from a battered woman, they&#8217;re—all they&#8217;re doing is reinforcing the isolation. So, if what anyone and everyone can do when they see or hear something that gives them an indication that a woman is being abused, that rather than looking away, if they can learn a few basic things, helping her understand that this is not her fault, that there is help for her, that she&#8217;s not alone, that we understand that leaving an abuser is not an event, it&#8217;s a process, but there are people in the community who can help you do this, is so important to helping her understand that she does in fact have people she can turn to. But then, the other side of it is we have to say to abusers, &quot;You can&#8217;t do this anymore.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Kit Gruelle is an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, and Cythia Hill, director of the new HBO documentary, Private Violence , which is currently at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on HBO later this year.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, Alive Inside: A Story of Music &amp; Memory . Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: Yes, this is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. We are in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival following the documentary track, dealing with the critical issues of the day.

BRIANCARLSON, ABC 4 Utah: It’s believed a Lindon police officer shot and killed his entire family. Today five people were found dead in his Spanish Fork home, including the officer and his two children, just five and seven years old.

BOBEVANS, FOX 13: Authorities say Lindon police officer Joshua Boren shot and killed his mother-in-law, wife and two young children before turning the gun on himself.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s actually not a clip from a documentary; it happened last week here in Utah as the Sundance Film Festival got underway.

Back home in New York City, a 21-year-old woman and her two daughters, ages two and one, were found stabbed to death over the weekend. The victim’s husband has been arrested in Texas. Police had reportedly investigated two incidents of domestic violence at their home this year.

The list of such tragedies is long, but they are often not named for what they are: part of an epidemic of intimate partner violence. In fact, there’s a documentary here at Sundance that deals with that very issue. It’s called Private Violence, and it highlights the struggles of survivors and the advocates who support them. Set in North Carolina and directed by Cynthia Hill, the film follows advocate Kit Gruelle, who is herself a domestic violence survivor. This is a trailer. A warning that this is footage that’s disturbing.

KITGRUELLE: I do this work because I survived a really violent relationship, and it took me getting into this work and understanding it to really see that it’s just so widespread.

DEANNAWALTERS: This last time, he almost killed me in front of my daughter.

KITGRUELLE: But what happened to you shouldn’t happen to anybody ever.

DEANNAWALTERS: I know. That’s why I’m here.

KITGRUELLE: What do your parents have to say about it?

DEANNAWALTERS: "Why didn’t you just leave?"

KITGRUELLE: Did he ever threaten to kill you?

DEANNAWALTERS: Yeah, lots of times.

UNIDENTIFIED: She is still living, correct?

KITGRUELLE: She’s still alive. The local prosecutor, he declined to prosecute because, he says, she should have tried to get away from him.

If he was convicted only of misdemeanor assault on a female, what would he be looking at as far as time?

PROSECUTOR: The most he could receive is 150 days in jail.

UNIDENTIFIED: The daughter and Deanna were back in the cab part of the truck. He just started beating on her.

DEANNAWALTERS: Martina asked him over and over, "Why are you doing it? Why are you hurting my mama?"

UNIDENTIFIED: Once he got back to North Carolina, he was interviewed by law enforcement and admitted to beating her so badly that he almost broke his fingers.

ADVOCATE: As an advocate, there were so many injustices that I felt like happened with her. Martina was removed from Deanna. That really angered me.

KITGRUELLE: What was it like when they came and took Martina?

DEANNAWALTERS: It destroyed me. She still asks me why I gave her away.

KITGRUELLE: So she remembers it.

DEANNAWALTERS: Yeah.

KITGRUELLE: Our criminal justice system requires she be beaten enough to satisfy the system. And by the time it gets to that point, she’s already been so worn down psychologically and physically and emotionally. You know, the courts have told her that she doesn’t have value, and her partner has told her that she doesn’t have value. Perhaps family and friends have done that through their actions with her. "Why don’t you just leave him? Why are you staying with him?" That’s when it’s really time for advocates to really step up.

Luckily, the feds picked up the case, and it’s going to be prosecuted under the federal Violence Against Women Act. If he doesn’t go to prison, he will turn around immediately and start to hurt women again.

UNIDENTIFIED: If we weren’t going to do anything, then maybe nothing was going to be done. And something had to be done.

DEANNAWALTERS: I’m not going to let him get away with what he’d done to me, my daughters. Nobody should get away with this. Nobody.

KITGRUELLE: I’m always so astonished and moved at the people who want to come into this movement and do this work, because it’s not easy work. It can be heartbreaking and frustrating. But it can also be unbelievably uplifting. You witness victims shedding that skin and just leaving the violence behind.

AMYGOODMAN: The HBO documentary film, Private Violence, is currently at the Sundance Film Festival. I sat down Tuesday with the film’s director, Cynthia Lynch, and advocate Kit Gruelle. I started by asking Kit to talk about her own story.

KITGRUELLE: I survived a very violent marriage that ended with the death of my husband 34 years ago. And he was killed in an accident offshore in Louisiana, and it just was—the whole experience was so astonishing, and it took a long time for me to start to pull myself together. But then I took my boys and moved down from the mountains to the Chapel Hill area, and I saw an ad for a training opportunity for crisis line volunteers for the domestic violence program. And I went to the training, and I felt like I had just been—that I had found my emotional home, my spiritual home, my intellectual home. And it just fit with my personality type, because I feel very strongly—I’m a human rights activist, but, to me, this is so essential because if you can’t be safe in your own home, then where can you be safe? And then, because of my own experience, I just recognized that it wasn’t just the abuser that the victim had to deal with, it was also these oppressive systems who would marginalize her and judge her and stigmatize her and make her feel like she was doing something wrong. And so, I wanted to challenge that, too.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you tell us your story, when you talk about being a victim of domestic violence? I think what happens is, people just say that phrase, and then other women who go through it think, "Well, I"—if it’s not described, they think, "That—I can’t be going through what they call domestic violence."

KITGRUELLE: Well, I’m glad you asked that question, because a lot of people believe that domestic violence only happens to poor, uneducated women. In my case, my late husband had been—he had gone into Vietnam, gone to the Vietnam War as a marine, and so he was trained by the Marines to be aggressive, to hunt people down and kill them. And he told me repeatedly that if I ever tried to leave, that there wasn’t a place on the planet that I could go to get away from him.

And so, the reality for battered women is they just learn to live with the violence, because, unfortunately, for a great number of women, when they do make that bold move, what I often refer to as a declaration of independence, and say, "I can’t live like this anymore. The children can’t live like this anymore. We’ve got to go," then the abusers oftentimes hunt them down and kill them. And so, for us, as advocates, we see women have to make the choice of staying and living with the violence or leaving and running the risk of being killed. And we just believe that there should be a lot more options, and that’s what advocates work towards.

The other thing is that we’re so desensitized to violence in the United States that oftentimes women have to be beaten badly enough before our criminal justice system responds, like, for example, in North Carolina we have a charge called misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon. So a North Carolina man can shoot or stab his wife or girlfriend, and unless it involves a serious injury or a life-threatening injury, it’s going to be charged at the misdemeanor level. And so, essentially what that is is that’s just the criminal justice system giving him a green light to just carry on.

AMYGOODMAN: In your case, how did you cope with your children coping with the violence? And what did your husband do to you?

KITGRUELLE: He—the thing that he liked to do most was strangle me. I think he liked knowing that he had my life in his hands. And he—you know, he put his hands around my neck and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. And, you know, I’m not going to use the language that he would use, but he’d say, "I could break your blanking neck if I wanted to."

And then there were the things that I refer to as the minutia. He was trying to gain muscle weight. He was a bodybuilder, and he wanted a lot of calories that were protein calories. And so, he wanted—every night he’d have a bowl of ice cream, and on the ice cream he wanted peanuts because, he said, the peanuts were so high in protein. But when I went to the grocery store—and he didn’t want the—he didn’t want salt on the peanuts because, he said, the salt would cause him to retain fluid. But when I went to the grocery store, I had to buy salted peanuts, bring them home, rinse them off in the colander, pat them dry, put them on the ice cream. And then, if he came across salt on his peanuts on the ice cream, then he’d come after me because, he said, I didn’t do a good enough job washing the peanuts. And so, one of the things that’s so important is that I couldn’t call law enforcement and say, "I’m terrorized by husband because I don’t do a good enough job washing the peanuts." They’d laugh at that.

But the reality of it is, is the anger is only a tactic. What it’s about is control. What it’s about is seeing the woman, the wife or girlfriend, as personal property to do with as the abuser pleases. That was certainly the case with my husband, as he just treated me like I was his private property to do with as he pleased.

AMYGOODMAN: And how did the kids deal with it?

KITGRUELLE: Well, Jason, our son, was only 14 months old when his dad died, so he didn’t—he didn’t see anything. And Matt, my older son, I don’t think he remembers much, because he was only four when Jack died. But it’s been—it’s been interesting for me as a single mom raising boys, wanting very much for them to grow up knowing how to relate to women in respectful and nonviolent ways. And there were challenges along the way, because there’s a lot of external, you know, misogynistic reinforcers. But I had them at Friends School for a while, and they’ve grown up to be two pretty great guys.

AMYGOODMAN: Kit Gruelle, a domestic violence survivor, who’s been an advocate for other survivors for 30 years. Her story is featured in the new documentary, Private Violence, which premiered here at Sundance this week. We’ll return to our conversation with Kit, as well as the film’s director, Cynthia Hill, after break.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival, where a new film just premiered called Private Violence. It airs on HBO later this year. I sat down Tuesday with the film’s director, Cynthia Hill, and its main subject, domestic violence survivor, advocate, Kit Gruelle. We’ll return to that interview in a moment, but first, this is a clip from the film where Kit seeks advice from a prosecutor about the case of a woman named Deanna Walters.

PROSECUTOR: Yes, ma’am. What’s up?

KITGRUELLE: So, I want to talk with you a little bit about this case up in Ashe County involving a woman who was kidnapped, pretty severe beating.

PROSECUTOR: And when you say kidnapped, do you mean—

KITGRUELLE: Kidnapped.

PROSECUTOR: OK, held against her will.

KITGRUELLE: Held against her will, she and her daughter.

PROSECUTOR: Transported.

KITGRUELLE: She and her daughter taken out of the—out of the state, driven all the way to California and halfway back, and the truck was stopped in Oklahoma. This was an 18-wheeler.

PROSECUTOR: OK.

KITGRUELLE: And he beat her for four-and-a-half days.

PROSECUTOR: What kind of injuries did she have? Holy crap!

KITGRUELLE: So, this is the injuries.

PROSECUTOR: What did he use?

KITGRUELLE: His fist, a Maglite flashlight. He bit her.

PROSECUTOR: Any internal injuries? Or is it all—is it all tissue injury, soft tissue injury?

KITGRUELLE: Well, he also strangled her.

PROSECUTOR: OK. Do we have any medical doctor who’s going to say these are serious injuries? Because, you know, in state court, that’s the tough part, is when we’re talking about soft tissue injuries, when you don’t have damage to the spleen, internal injuries, or cuts that require stitches. Concussions can be serious injury.

KITGRUELLE: The local prosecutor called this a misdemeanor assault.

PROSECUTOR: OK. No.

KITGRUELLE: Yes.

PROSECUTOR: OK, no. I would push felony charges probably for kidnapping. If it’s a Maglite, a Maglite’s a deadly weapon—assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. It’s all about getting a medical doctor to say on the stand, "Yes, this is serious injury." Is it serious bodily injury? Sure. Is it protracted pain and suffering that she has suffered? Yeah, I think so. But even if we succeed on all levels, what I’m telling you, Kit, is that you may not be satisfied with the amount of time that they’re going to get at the state level.

KITGRUELLE: If he was convicted only of misdemeanor assault on a female, even with doing this—

PROSECUTOR: Yeah.

KITGRUELLE: —what would he be looking at as far as time?

PROSECUTOR: The most he could receive is 150 days in jail.

KITGRUELLE: A hundred and fifty days in jail for this.

PROSECUTOR: That’s it. So, that’s what I’m saying. You have a clear case where he’s transporting a woman across state lines for the purpose of terrorizing and assaulting her. That is a federal case all over. And so, what we need to do, or what you need to do, since it’s not, you know, in my county, is really push and talk to the federal prosecutor in that area, in that district, which would be the Western District, and say this is the case, and get them interested in it. I think they will be.

KITGRUELLE: Mm-hmm.

PROSECUTOR: I think they will be.

KITGRUELLE: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: So that’s a clip from the film Private Violence, astounding conversation you have with the prosecutor. Can you tell us who Deanna Walters is, who her abuser was, what happened?

KITGRUELLE: Deanna Walters is a woman from the mountains of North Carolina, from West Jefferson. She was attempting to separate from her husband, and he wound up kidnapping her and their daughter, and putting them in an 18-wheeler. He had his cousin drive. And as they left North Carolina and drove all the way out to California and halfway back to Oklahoma, Robbie beat Deanna and strangled Deanna and kicked Deanna and urinated in her face and beat her with a Maglite flashlight and almost killed her. And she survived. When the truck was stopped in Oklahoma, she was taken to the local hospital.

AMYGOODMAN: And it was stopped because—explain how the police were alerted.

KITGRUELLE: It was only stopped because Deanna—Robbie put Deanna on the phone with people that he was paranoid that she was having affairs with, which was baloney. She wasn’t—you know, she wasn’t doing that at all. And because of her robotic sort of approach to having these conversations, they became concerned that something was happening. They called the trucking company. The trucking company realized that he had unauthorized riders in the cab, and the truck was pulled over in Oklahoma.

And Deanna got out of the cab looking like this—just like she had been in the worst car accident possible. I mean, her face was smashed in. She had petechial hemorrhage in her eyes, which is the first symptom of acute strangulation assaults. Her body was bruised from, you know, the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Her knees were grotesquely swollen where he had beaten her with a Maglite flashlight, I think, so that she couldn’t run. And—

AMYGOODMAN: Her daughter watched this?

KITGRUELLE: Her daughter witnessed everything.

AMYGOODMAN: Her daughter was how old?

KITGRUELLE: Deanna was three or four at the time.

CYNTHIAHILL: Martina.

KITGRUELLE: And she witnessed everything.

AMYGOODMAN: Her daughter.

KITGRUELLE: Yeah, Martina. And Martina was just screaming and screaming over and over again, "Why are you doing this to my mom? Why are you doing this to my mom?" And Robbie would say things to Martina like, "I’m doing this because your mother doesn’t love us, so it’s OK for me to do this." And Deanna had had a seizure disorder that had been in check, but after the blows to the head, her seizure disorder has now started back up again, so she’s on medication for that.

And yet, when she got back to North Carolina, the local prosecutor, his first question to her was: "Why didn’t you try to run?" And, you know, there are a thousand reasons why she didn’t try to run. Robbie said that if she tried to run, he’d kill Martina. She didn’t know where she was. She was hideously beaten. She was being threatened with her life. She was afraid that if she ran or tried to run, he’d kill her, and she didn’t know what would happen to Martina. So, this is why we have to stop asking women, "Why don’t you just leave?"

AMYGOODMAN: And there was another problem: The question of where she was beaten would determine whether he was charged and where he would be charged—

KITGRUELLE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: —given that he was crossing state lines.

KITGRUELLE: Right, right. Well, he kidnapped her in North Carolina, but the local prosecutor seemed unimpressed with her injuries. In fact, when Robbie did come back from Oklahoma, he told the local law enforcement officers that he beat her so bad that he thought he broke his fingers. And yet they still only charged him with misdemeanor assault on a female.

AMYGOODMAN: They left him on the roadside, the police—

KITGRUELLE: Mm-hmm, right.

AMYGOODMAN: —because he had her say that she was—he was saving her from a beating by someone else, and that’s why she was in the truck.

KITGRUELLE: And he also told her not to say that he’d done this. So, as long as Robbie was within earshot, of course she was going to say what she’d been instructed to say. But the minute she was able to say, "No, he did this to me," by then he was gone—

CYNTHIAHILL: Yeah, [inaudible].

KITGRUELLE: —hitchhiking back to North Carolina.

AMYGOODMAN: So, Cynthia Hill, as you followed this story as a filmmaker, as it unfolds, and you were doing it as it unfolds—

CYNTHIAHILL: Yes, mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: So you didn’t know the final outcome.

CYNTHIAHILL: No. When we first met Deanna, it was just a few months after the incident had actually happened, and she was so distraught thinking that nothing was going to come of this and that he was not going to be held accountable for anything. And she just was—I don’t know. She just—and you can see this in the film. She just is—she seems hopeless, like, "I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I’m just going to have to live with this."

But what’s amazing about having this story and this trajectory and watching this process of seeking justice and the feds finally picking up the case and him actually going to prison for almost 21 years, and seeing Deanna transform from victim to survivor is pretty spectacular. You know, I don’t think—I mean, it’s one thing that I have never seen in a film, or a documentary film, actually being able to see physically her transformation.

AMYGOODMAN: The horrific injuries she suffered, the police that found her said they hadn’t seen injuries like that even in car accidents, when they dragged people out, from head to toe.

CYNTHIAHILL: Yeah, there’s this one image of her laying on the hospital bed, and she looks like a corpse. It looks like she’s dead. She just is so bruised. And you just cannot imagine somebody actually experiencing all of this, in the way she looks, and still be alive.

AMYGOODMAN: But unlike in many cases, he is convicted. He is sentenced. Talk about that sentence.

KITGRUELLE: Yeah, and he got—we were thrilled at the sentence that he got, because it shows the difference between the federal prosecution, where he got a 21-year-plus sentence, and in North Carolina the most he would have gotten is 150 days. So, it just shows the stark contrast.

AMYGOODMAN: And it was 150 days he would have gotten because? That’s 150 days, is 30 times four—30 times five is five months.

KITGRUELLE: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, for beating her like he did.

AMYGOODMAN: Almost to death. This is attempted murder.

KITGRUELLE: Mm-hmm, it should have been charged as attempted murder, right. But because of the kind of inherent patriarchy in our criminal justice system and because there are many laws that still regard women as less than or as the property of their husbands, because that’s the reality of how it plays out—I mean, we do have good laws on the books in some states, but how do those laws get translated? And what does it mean for someone like Deanna to be beaten that badly by her husband and then to have the person who’s in charge of holding him accountable for what he did look at her and say, "Why didn’t you run?" It’s just a completely upside-down and backwards way to approach this very private violence, that ultimately plays itself out in public ways, because when kids grow up exposed to domestic violence, they tend to not do well in school. Oftentimes they wind up running away. Girls get pregnant early. Boys become violent themselves. They join gangs. So, I refer to domestic violence as kind of the Petri dish for all of the other social issues that we ultimately pay for.

AMYGOODMAN: Having worked in a domestic violence shelter, battered women’s shelter myself, I know another issue is dealing with the police, and that’s dealt with very well in this film. You actually train police in how not to abet the abuser. What is the accepted wisdom now on what to do when a cop is called into a domestic violence situation, which is probably the most violent situation overall? Domestic violence cases are the most violent and threatening for police officers of any situation, which most people might not know.

KITGRUELLE: Well, one of the things that has happened, thanks to the Violence Against Women Act, is that there has been a lot of law enforcement training. And part of what they look at now is who’s the dominant aggressor. And so, they’ve been trained in looking at offensive versus defensive injuries. They do a much, much more comprehensive and thorough job gathering evidence, talking to other people, talking to neighbors. And as a result, I think that a majority of law enforcement officers around the country now see domestic violence as an actual crime, and they treat it like a crime.

But unfortunately, in many pockets around the country, it’s still not considered criminal conduct. And so, for me, as someone who works very closely with law enforcement in North Carolina and also in California, I just hope that in the next months, years, decades, that we can really start to focus on this crime and deal more appropriately early on with the offender rather than blaming her for what he’s done.

AMYGOODMAN: In California, you train hostage negotiators because of your experience with women as hostages in domestic violence situations?

KITGRUELLE: Well, part of what we’re trying to get the negotiators to understand is that battered women are what we refer to as benign hostages. And what we mean by that is that they—you know, they wake up every morning, and their abuser gives them a set of rules and regulations that they have to live by. And if they don’t abide by those terms and conditions strictly, then there are consequences—you know, physical violence, sexual violence, coercion, intimidation.

And 80 percent of the hostage-taking incidents every year in this country are domestic-violence-related. Most people think it’s about banks, but it’s not. It’s almost always where, you know, the woman has done what everyone has told her to do. She’s left. She’s got an order of protection. She’s drawn a line in the sand. And yet, he says to her and to the court system and everyone else, "You’re not—no, you’re not walking away from me." And he goes over and barricades in, and then the hostage negotiators are called out.

AMYGOODMAN: In fact, aren’t many mass shootings—

KITGRUELLE: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: —when you actually read the article or listen carefully to the story, have to do with a man going after a woman in some situation, or her family or friends or the children?

KITGRUELLE: In fact, it just happened here in Utah last week. Right as we got here, there was a police officer who shot and killed his wife, his two children, his mother-in-law and then himself. And what I’ve heard from the domestic violence community around here, she had separated from him, and then they reconciled at the holidays. But it sounds like she probably had decided that it wasn’t going to work and was about to leave. And for many battered women, that’s the most dangerous time for them.

AMYGOODMAN: Cynthia, what are you hoping to do with this film? It is not an easy film. And so, it probably had something to do with you making your decision about whether—I mean, on the one hand, it’s such an important subject, but how are you going to get support for it, get audiences for it?

CYNTHIAHILL: Mm-hmm. Well, just to step back, I think the—what we really want to happen with the film, or what we want audiences to walk away with, is to not ask that question anymore of "Why doesn’t she just leave?" because it’s clear, after watching this film, that you cannot ask that question and expect to get any results that are meaningful. I mean, all it does is just blame the victim for the whole situation without putting any sort of responsibility on the perpetrator at all. And then, also, as society, you know, we need to understand that we do play a role in this.

AMYGOODMAN: You have an astounding moment in the film where a woman has killed her abuser, and the comment that these women, who are so violated, actually feel safer in prison than they do so-called free.

KITGRUELLE: Every woman that I’ve ever worked with who has killed her abuser, when she goes into the prison system, she says, "I’ve never felt this safe." And it just—it just blows my mind that this is—you know, this is the United States of America. And for battered women who turn to the criminal justice system, like Deanna did, only to be told, "Your injuries don’t satisfy me as being serious enough to do anything with it," and then it continues to happen, or she decides, "I’m not going to call 911, because what’s the point?" And then she has to take matters into her own hands, and then she goes to prison and says, "Well, this is the safest I’ve ever felt."

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Kit, you’ve done this work for decades now. What gives you hope? Do you see improvement in how domestic violence is dealt with?

KITGRUELLE: Well, I mean, it’s a privilege to be a part of this opportunity to train law enforcement officers in North Carolina and in California. I have to say California is very forward-thinking about this crime, so that gives me hope. We still have a long ways to go, and it’s not exclusive to the criminal justice community. I think that everyone has to understand that when they look away from a battered woman, they’re—all they’re doing is reinforcing the isolation. So, if what anyone and everyone can do when they see or hear something that gives them an indication that a woman is being abused, that rather than looking away, if they can learn a few basic things, helping her understand that this is not her fault, that there is help for her, that she’s not alone, that we understand that leaving an abuser is not an event, it’s a process, but there are people in the community who can help you do this, is so important to helping her understand that she does in fact have people she can turn to. But then, the other side of it is we have to say to abusers, "You can’t do this anymore."

AMYGOODMAN: Kit Gruelle is an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, and Cythia Hill, director of the new HBO documentary, Private Violence, which is currently at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on HBO later this year.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory. Stay with us.

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Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500Domestic Abuse Survivor Goldie Taylor on Giving Up Her Gun & the Unseen Plague of National Violencehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/20/domestic_abuse_survivor_goldie_taylor_on
tag:democracynow.org,2012-12-20:en/story/311721 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Funerals continue in Newtown, Connecticut, after Friday&#8217;s shooting rampage that left 20 students and six staff members dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four more children were laid to rest Wednesday, as well as the principal of the school, Dawn Hochsprung, and teacher Victoria Soto. Soto died while shielding her students from gunfire. She was remembered by a friend after her memorial service.
CONNIE DELOTTINVILLE : She was one of the most beautiful people, like the really super popular person, but she was friendly with everyone, like she did not have a mean bone in her body, always smiling and laughing, and you could hear her down the hallway. She was a great person. So, this is just such a tragic loss. And we were going to have our 10-year high school reunion next year, and I was really looking forward to seeing her and seeing everyone again. And quite the damper on things.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, President Obama announced Wednesday he would appoint a new White House-led effort, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, to reform gun control policies, which he would outline in his annual State of the Union address next month.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : The fact that we can&#8217;t prevent every act of violence doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t steadily reduce the violence and prevent the very worst violence. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve asked the vice president to lead an effort that includes members of my cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January, proposals that I then intend to push without delay. This is not some Washington commission. This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for six months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside. This is a team that has a very specific task: to pull together real reforms right now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama also referred to the ongoing toll from gun violence around the country since Friday&#8217;s attack.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Since Friday morning, a police officer was gunned down in Memphis, leaving four children without their mother. Two officers were killed outside a grocery store in Topeka. A woman was shot and killed inside a Las Vegas casino. Three people were shot inside an Alabama hospital. A four-year-old was caught in a drive-by in Missouri and taken off life support just yesterday. Each one of these Americans was a victim of the everyday gun violence that takes the lives of more than 10,000 Americans every year, violence that we cannot accept as routine.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, to talk more about the factors leading to gun violence, from Newtown, Connecticut, to the streets of cities like Chicago, where the homicide rate spiked earlier this year—more than 500 gun murders in the past year—and also behind closed doors in cases of domestic violence, we&#8217;re joined by Goldie Taylor. She lost both her father and her brother to gun violence. She is an MSNBC contributor and managing editor of &quot;The Goldie Taylor Project.&quot; She recently wrote a piece entitled &quot;After my father and brother were murdered, owning a gun made me feel secure. Now it&#8217;s time to give it up.&quot; And she did just that on Monday.
Goldie Taylor, welcome to Democracy Now! Let&#8217;s go back a ways, how you ended up getting your gun. Tell us your life story.
GOLDIE TAYLOR : You know, I grew up with guns, Amy. It was a part of our life. We grew up in East St. Louis. And so, having a gun was really a part of the family security, along with having burglar bars and those kinds of things. When my father was murdered in 1973, my mother immediately bought a gun and kept it in the house for, you know, all of our lives. My brother was murdered in a similar fashion about 20 years later. And it really took the family by storm. At that time, I bought my own gun. I did not want my sons to live the fate or end in the fate that my father and brother had, and so I did what I thought I needed to do to protect them.
I had been a former marine, and so I had weapons training. My stepfather had been a detective sergeant at the East St. Louis Police Department, and so, you know, it was natural to me to have a weapon in the house. But over the years, you know, I&#8217;ve just come to understand that having a privately owned, even though legal, weapon in your home, you are more likely—more likely to hurt yourself or someone that you care about than you are to hurt someone who is trying to hurt you from the outside. And so, those are, you know, the real statistics.
But we&#8217;ve got a real dilemma here. My father and brother were murdered with illegal guns. And this country is awash in them. The black market is just, you know, inundated, from Los Angeles to New York, Chicago, of course, Atlanta, where young men of color, you know, are using these guns on each other and, as a consequence, also hurting children surrounding them. And so, the University of Chicago says that one in five children who are hit by gunfire are not the intended target. There was a little girl in Chicago on her mother&#8217;s lap having her hair combed one warm evening in Chicago. She was shot by a stray bullet. And that is the tragedy in this country. You know, something about Newtown really brings this, you know, home for many people who aren&#8217;t impacted by violence on a daily basis.
But I turned my gun in, and I&#8217;ve watched and listened as others turned theirs in, and I&#8217;m glad that it&#8217;s beginning to happen. You know, some of these cities have had record buyback programs over the last 72 to 96 hours, and I&#8217;m really proud of that. I&#8217;m glad that we&#8217;re going to have a conversation about gun control in this country. I&#8217;m glad we&#8217;re going to have a conversation, I think, finally, about mental health and access to it. I think I&#8217;m really glad that we&#8217;re going to have, I believe, a conversation holistically about, you know, just our violent culture in general. It&#8217;s in our popular culture. It&#8217;s in our popular media.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Goldie Taylor, I wanted to ask you about that particularly, the culture of the country, because, as you say, the illegal gun problem is a bigger problem in the inner city, but clearly in the suburbs of America, in the heartland of America, many folks with legal guns also sometimes engage in some of these—many of these violent acts. And as we&#8217;re having the conversation for those who are turning their guns in, there&#8217;s also a section of the American people who are clinging desperately to this idea of their right to continue to have guns and not—even assault weapons. In the Connecticut case, for instance, the mother trained her children in the use of guns. And many Americans do that, continue to train their children in the use of guns from an early age. Could you talk a little bit more about the culture of violence in America, from your perspective?
GOLDIE TAYLOR : You know, I think that—you know, I believe in the Second Amendment, but as the president said, there is an awfully large gap between having the right to bear arms as is stated in the Second Amendment and then being able to own an assault rifle. I think that there are—being former military, I think that there are certain kinds of weaponry that civilians simply should not have access to. There are certain kinds of ammunition that civilians should not have access to. You know, I don&#8217;t know why a civilian would need, for instance, a hollow-point bullet, those things that are armor-piercing. You know, that is something that we ought to be able to severely regulate. But, you know, I do believe that people ought to be able to have, for instance, a shotgun, if you&#8217;re living in rural America, for home protection, if you choose to do that. It&#8217;s your right. I don&#8217;t happen to want to choose it for myself anymore.
But the idea that we as Americans have a right to assault rifles, that we have a right to, you know, armor-piercing bullets, I think that that is simply a fallacy. I think the—I think the Supreme Court has ruled that the individual right to bear arms for home self-protection, you know, is something that they—that is settled law for them. But what is, you know, I think widely open—you know, we regulate things like Sudafed. You know, I can&#8217;t buy but so much of it, and I have to go to my pharmacist and have it—you know, I can&#8217;t buy it off the shelf anymore. Why is it that I can get online and order a Bushmaster or order a Beretta or a nine-millimeter Glock? You know, why is it that I can go to a gun show and not have a background check or show appropriate identification and buy a gun? Forty percent of the guns in this country, both rural and urban, are bought without appropriate background checks. There are so many loopholes in our gun law, and we simply have to close them.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Goldie Taylor, and we&#8217;re going to take a break. When we come back, I want to ask you about your own personal experiences with domestic violence and guns, and let&#8217;s talk more about the inner cities, what deaths count and what don&#8217;t. The horror that we see in Newtown, should it be a model for how the media covers all murders in this country? Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;What&#8217;s Going On?&quot; by Marvin Gaye, Marvin Gaye who was shot dead by his father with a gun that Marvin had given him as a gift. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest, Goldie Taylor, MSNBC contributor, managing editor of &quot;The Goldie Taylor Project,&quot; where she writes about contemporary, social and political issues. We&#8217;re speaking to her in Atlanta, Georgia.
Goldie, can you tell us your own story about the linkage of domestic violence and guns?
GOLDIE TAYLOR : Sure. You know, here in Atlanta, I have lived here, I guess, probably 27 years now. During our first year here in Atlanta, I met who I thought was the most charming man in the world. We moved in together, started college, you know, just started to build a life with him. And not long after that is when the abuse began. He began to isolate me from my family, from my friends, began to belittle every single thing that I did. And then it became physically abusive.
I felt trapped, even though my mother lived less than 10 miles away. I was afraid to tell her what was happening, because for so many young women there is an unfortunate culture of silence, you know, that sort of places a dome around what&#8217;s happening in some of these homes. I remember a relative used to tell me back when we were younger that what happens between that man and that woman is between that man and that woman. It is probably, looking back, the most unfortunate thing that I&#8217;ve ever heard.
It ended for me the night that I was stabbed in my back. There was a horrific beating, where I was stomped and kicked, choked until I blacked out. And I ran. I took an opportunity to run. And I knew that if I didn&#8217;t run, that I was going to die that night. There is a scar on my left shoulder today from where he took a paring knife from the kitchen and caught me in the shoulder just as I broke through the door. He did not serve any jail time. It was broken down to a misdemeanor and then later dismissed.
And I look back on that today, and I understand that, you know, there have been new laws on the books since that happened, including compulsory arrest, that, you know, it is a little bit easier today to get a restraining order than maybe it used to be. There are new stalking laws on the books. And I&#8217;m grateful for all of that. But what we really have got to see is grassroots action around providing women safe haven, and then providing counseling and therapy for the men involved—and so, not only punishment, but treatment, because an abuser will abuse again. Hurt people hurt other people, and until there is some real healing.
You know, I wrote about my story because there was a young woman in the news who I kept hearing about, but I never heard her name. Her name was Kasandra Perkins, and she was the girlfriend and mother of child of Jovan Belcher. And I woke one morning to find that he had shot her nine times and killed himself. And relatives and friends will recount that the relationship was, as they called it, fraught or troublesome. The NFL team had engaged the couple in counseling. I believe a lot of people knew that it was coming, that one day he would kill her. And no one—no one did a thing. And so, I told my story, because Kassie and other young women like her aren&#8217;t here to tell theirs. Three women every day in this country are killed in domestic violence situations, whether it&#8217;s a knife, a beating or a gun. All too often, the gun makes it too easy. If there had been a gun involved in my situation, I am certain—certain—I would not be here today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Goldie Taylor, I wanted to ask you, you&#8217;re former military, as well. Your sense, because our country obviously has been involved in so many military actions abroad and—the impact of the—how the military trains people in terms of the use of weapons and the impact of that once they get out of the military?
GOLDIE TAYLOR : Well, I think it&#8217;s two things. One, it is the weapons training that we receive, but, two, it&#8217;s the care that we don&#8217;t receive when we come home. You know, the level of PTSD , among both the men and women who see action on the front line and those who don&#8217;t, is really at—at a level that we haven&#8217;t seen in a very long time, because we have engaged ourselves in so many wars on so many fronts. But when we come home, the treatment, the care that&#8217;s needed, simply isn&#8217;t there. You know, our nation&#8217;s VA system, you know, is largely broken. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve spent much time in a VA hospital, but it&#8217;s a very tough place to get through, to get into its system and to actually receive care. You get better care, I think, at one of your county hospitals. And so, I think it is two things. It is, one, the weapons training, but it&#8217;s, two, you know, coming home to civilian life and making that transition, you know, isn&#8217;t always as easy for some of us as it may seem.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, the violence in urban areas, Goldie, how we cover violence in a place like Newtown, this horrific massacre that has taken place, the worst massacre in an elementary school in this country&#8217;s history, the worst school killing after Virginia Tech, and how we cover the constant violence in the inner cities, like Chicago, this figure of roughly 500 people killed in the last year, a quarter of them children under 18—in all of those cases, gun deaths.
GOLDIE TAYLOR : You know, I—there is something very horrific about Newtown, that there were 20 children, that there were six adults, that—well, seven adults, including his mother, because I include her. Even though she trained her son to shoot, and he had access to those guns, she was shot in her sleep. And so, I think there is something horrific about that to be set aside.
But in terms of the other 30,000-plus deaths in this country due to gun violence a year, the way that they are covered by media, the way that they are investigated, the level to which they are prosecuted, that convictions come, and even the level of sentencing, all of those things are never determined by the race of the shooter; they&#8217;re determined, as I&#8217;ve found, by the race of the victim. And so, you have African-American children, Hispanic children here in Gwinnett County, where I sit today, who are dying of gun violence, and no one&#8217;s talking about it. It&#8217;s because, as Americans, we feel as though it is isolated or contained to certain undesirable communities, and that if we just keep it away from us, then it won&#8217;t impact us. And so, you see a flash of it on the nightly news. You see a flash of it on a radio program in the morning. You know, we learned about my father&#8217;s death over a radio program. But to hear, to see the national coverage, it has to be random, and it has to be somebody who looks like us. I always said when the &quot;that could happen to me&quot; syndrome kicks in, that&#8217;s when there&#8217;s coverage. That&#8217;s when there is investigation and prosecution. That&#8217;s when you see more heavy sentences coming to bear. And, you know, I&#8217;m writing a piece now that is tentatively titled &quot;The Color of Life,&quot; because we, as a society, place differing values on differing lives according to race, gender, socioeconomic status and all of that.
AMY GOODMAN : Goldie Taylor, we want to thank you very much for being with us, MSNBC contributor, managing editor of &quot;The Goldie Taylor Project,&quot; where she writes about contemporary social and political issues — her website is goldietaylorproject.com — speaking to us from Atlanta. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Funerals continue in Newtown, Connecticut, after Friday’s shooting rampage that left 20 students and six staff members dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four more children were laid to rest Wednesday, as well as the principal of the school, Dawn Hochsprung, and teacher Victoria Soto. Soto died while shielding her students from gunfire. She was remembered by a friend after her memorial service.

CONNIEDELOTTINVILLE: She was one of the most beautiful people, like the really super popular person, but she was friendly with everyone, like she did not have a mean bone in her body, always smiling and laughing, and you could hear her down the hallway. She was a great person. So, this is just such a tragic loss. And we were going to have our 10-year high school reunion next year, and I was really looking forward to seeing her and seeing everyone again. And quite the damper on things.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, President Obama announced Wednesday he would appoint a new White House-led effort, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, to reform gun control policies, which he would outline in his annual State of the Union address next month.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: The fact that we can’t prevent every act of violence doesn’t mean we can’t steadily reduce the violence and prevent the very worst violence. That’s why I’ve asked the vice president to lead an effort that includes members of my cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January, proposals that I then intend to push without delay. This is not some Washington commission. This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for six months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside. This is a team that has a very specific task: to pull together real reforms right now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama also referred to the ongoing toll from gun violence around the country since Friday’s attack.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Since Friday morning, a police officer was gunned down in Memphis, leaving four children without their mother. Two officers were killed outside a grocery store in Topeka. A woman was shot and killed inside a Las Vegas casino. Three people were shot inside an Alabama hospital. A four-year-old was caught in a drive-by in Missouri and taken off life support just yesterday. Each one of these Americans was a victim of the everyday gun violence that takes the lives of more than 10,000 Americans every year, violence that we cannot accept as routine.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, to talk more about the factors leading to gun violence, from Newtown, Connecticut, to the streets of cities like Chicago, where the homicide rate spiked earlier this year—more than 500 gun murders in the past year—and also behind closed doors in cases of domestic violence, we’re joined by Goldie Taylor. She lost both her father and her brother to gun violence. She is an MSNBC contributor and managing editor of "The Goldie Taylor Project." She recently wrote a piece entitled "After my father and brother were murdered, owning a gun made me feel secure. Now it’s time to give it up." And she did just that on Monday.

Goldie Taylor, welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s go back a ways, how you ended up getting your gun. Tell us your life story.

GOLDIETAYLOR: You know, I grew up with guns, Amy. It was a part of our life. We grew up in East St. Louis. And so, having a gun was really a part of the family security, along with having burglar bars and those kinds of things. When my father was murdered in 1973, my mother immediately bought a gun and kept it in the house for, you know, all of our lives. My brother was murdered in a similar fashion about 20 years later. And it really took the family by storm. At that time, I bought my own gun. I did not want my sons to live the fate or end in the fate that my father and brother had, and so I did what I thought I needed to do to protect them.

I had been a former marine, and so I had weapons training. My stepfather had been a detective sergeant at the East St. Louis Police Department, and so, you know, it was natural to me to have a weapon in the house. But over the years, you know, I’ve just come to understand that having a privately owned, even though legal, weapon in your home, you are more likely—more likely to hurt yourself or someone that you care about than you are to hurt someone who is trying to hurt you from the outside. And so, those are, you know, the real statistics.

But we’ve got a real dilemma here. My father and brother were murdered with illegal guns. And this country is awash in them. The black market is just, you know, inundated, from Los Angeles to New York, Chicago, of course, Atlanta, where young men of color, you know, are using these guns on each other and, as a consequence, also hurting children surrounding them. And so, the University of Chicago says that one in five children who are hit by gunfire are not the intended target. There was a little girl in Chicago on her mother’s lap having her hair combed one warm evening in Chicago. She was shot by a stray bullet. And that is the tragedy in this country. You know, something about Newtown really brings this, you know, home for many people who aren’t impacted by violence on a daily basis.

But I turned my gun in, and I’ve watched and listened as others turned theirs in, and I’m glad that it’s beginning to happen. You know, some of these cities have had record buyback programs over the last 72 to 96 hours, and I’m really proud of that. I’m glad that we’re going to have a conversation about gun control in this country. I’m glad we’re going to have a conversation, I think, finally, about mental health and access to it. I think I’m really glad that we’re going to have, I believe, a conversation holistically about, you know, just our violent culture in general. It’s in our popular culture. It’s in our popular media.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Goldie Taylor, I wanted to ask you about that particularly, the culture of the country, because, as you say, the illegal gun problem is a bigger problem in the inner city, but clearly in the suburbs of America, in the heartland of America, many folks with legal guns also sometimes engage in some of these—many of these violent acts. And as we’re having the conversation for those who are turning their guns in, there’s also a section of the American people who are clinging desperately to this idea of their right to continue to have guns and not—even assault weapons. In the Connecticut case, for instance, the mother trained her children in the use of guns. And many Americans do that, continue to train their children in the use of guns from an early age. Could you talk a little bit more about the culture of violence in America, from your perspective?

GOLDIETAYLOR: You know, I think that—you know, I believe in the Second Amendment, but as the president said, there is an awfully large gap between having the right to bear arms as is stated in the Second Amendment and then being able to own an assault rifle. I think that there are—being former military, I think that there are certain kinds of weaponry that civilians simply should not have access to. There are certain kinds of ammunition that civilians should not have access to. You know, I don’t know why a civilian would need, for instance, a hollow-point bullet, those things that are armor-piercing. You know, that is something that we ought to be able to severely regulate. But, you know, I do believe that people ought to be able to have, for instance, a shotgun, if you’re living in rural America, for home protection, if you choose to do that. It’s your right. I don’t happen to want to choose it for myself anymore.

But the idea that we as Americans have a right to assault rifles, that we have a right to, you know, armor-piercing bullets, I think that that is simply a fallacy. I think the—I think the Supreme Court has ruled that the individual right to bear arms for home self-protection, you know, is something that they—that is settled law for them. But what is, you know, I think widely open—you know, we regulate things like Sudafed. You know, I can’t buy but so much of it, and I have to go to my pharmacist and have it—you know, I can’t buy it off the shelf anymore. Why is it that I can get online and order a Bushmaster or order a Beretta or a nine-millimeter Glock? You know, why is it that I can go to a gun show and not have a background check or show appropriate identification and buy a gun? Forty percent of the guns in this country, both rural and urban, are bought without appropriate background checks. There are so many loopholes in our gun law, and we simply have to close them.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to Goldie Taylor, and we’re going to take a break. When we come back, I want to ask you about your own personal experiences with domestic violence and guns, and let’s talk more about the inner cities, what deaths count and what don’t. The horror that we see in Newtown, should it be a model for how the media covers all murders in this country? Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: "What’s Going On?" by Marvin Gaye, Marvin Gaye who was shot dead by his father with a gun that Marvin had given him as a gift. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest, Goldie Taylor, MSNBC contributor, managing editor of "The Goldie Taylor Project," where she writes about contemporary, social and political issues. We’re speaking to her in Atlanta, Georgia.

Goldie, can you tell us your own story about the linkage of domestic violence and guns?

GOLDIETAYLOR: Sure. You know, here in Atlanta, I have lived here, I guess, probably 27 years now. During our first year here in Atlanta, I met who I thought was the most charming man in the world. We moved in together, started college, you know, just started to build a life with him. And not long after that is when the abuse began. He began to isolate me from my family, from my friends, began to belittle every single thing that I did. And then it became physically abusive.

I felt trapped, even though my mother lived less than 10 miles away. I was afraid to tell her what was happening, because for so many young women there is an unfortunate culture of silence, you know, that sort of places a dome around what’s happening in some of these homes. I remember a relative used to tell me back when we were younger that what happens between that man and that woman is between that man and that woman. It is probably, looking back, the most unfortunate thing that I’ve ever heard.

It ended for me the night that I was stabbed in my back. There was a horrific beating, where I was stomped and kicked, choked until I blacked out. And I ran. I took an opportunity to run. And I knew that if I didn’t run, that I was going to die that night. There is a scar on my left shoulder today from where he took a paring knife from the kitchen and caught me in the shoulder just as I broke through the door. He did not serve any jail time. It was broken down to a misdemeanor and then later dismissed.

And I look back on that today, and I understand that, you know, there have been new laws on the books since that happened, including compulsory arrest, that, you know, it is a little bit easier today to get a restraining order than maybe it used to be. There are new stalking laws on the books. And I’m grateful for all of that. But what we really have got to see is grassroots action around providing women safe haven, and then providing counseling and therapy for the men involved—and so, not only punishment, but treatment, because an abuser will abuse again. Hurt people hurt other people, and until there is some real healing.

You know, I wrote about my story because there was a young woman in the news who I kept hearing about, but I never heard her name. Her name was Kasandra Perkins, and she was the girlfriend and mother of child of Jovan Belcher. And I woke one morning to find that he had shot her nine times and killed himself. And relatives and friends will recount that the relationship was, as they called it, fraught or troublesome. The NFL team had engaged the couple in counseling. I believe a lot of people knew that it was coming, that one day he would kill her. And no one—no one did a thing. And so, I told my story, because Kassie and other young women like her aren’t here to tell theirs. Three women every day in this country are killed in domestic violence situations, whether it’s a knife, a beating or a gun. All too often, the gun makes it too easy. If there had been a gun involved in my situation, I am certain—certain—I would not be here today.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Goldie Taylor, I wanted to ask you, you’re former military, as well. Your sense, because our country obviously has been involved in so many military actions abroad and—the impact of the—how the military trains people in terms of the use of weapons and the impact of that once they get out of the military?

GOLDIETAYLOR: Well, I think it’s two things. One, it is the weapons training that we receive, but, two, it’s the care that we don’t receive when we come home. You know, the level of PTSD, among both the men and women who see action on the front line and those who don’t, is really at—at a level that we haven’t seen in a very long time, because we have engaged ourselves in so many wars on so many fronts. But when we come home, the treatment, the care that’s needed, simply isn’t there. You know, our nation’s VA system, you know, is largely broken. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in a VA hospital, but it’s a very tough place to get through, to get into its system and to actually receive care. You get better care, I think, at one of your county hospitals. And so, I think it is two things. It is, one, the weapons training, but it’s, two, you know, coming home to civilian life and making that transition, you know, isn’t always as easy for some of us as it may seem.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, the violence in urban areas, Goldie, how we cover violence in a place like Newtown, this horrific massacre that has taken place, the worst massacre in an elementary school in this country’s history, the worst school killing after Virginia Tech, and how we cover the constant violence in the inner cities, like Chicago, this figure of roughly 500 people killed in the last year, a quarter of them children under 18—in all of those cases, gun deaths.

GOLDIETAYLOR: You know, I—there is something very horrific about Newtown, that there were 20 children, that there were six adults, that—well, seven adults, including his mother, because I include her. Even though she trained her son to shoot, and he had access to those guns, she was shot in her sleep. And so, I think there is something horrific about that to be set aside.

But in terms of the other 30,000-plus deaths in this country due to gun violence a year, the way that they are covered by media, the way that they are investigated, the level to which they are prosecuted, that convictions come, and even the level of sentencing, all of those things are never determined by the race of the shooter; they’re determined, as I’ve found, by the race of the victim. And so, you have African-American children, Hispanic children here in Gwinnett County, where I sit today, who are dying of gun violence, and no one’s talking about it. It’s because, as Americans, we feel as though it is isolated or contained to certain undesirable communities, and that if we just keep it away from us, then it won’t impact us. And so, you see a flash of it on the nightly news. You see a flash of it on a radio program in the morning. You know, we learned about my father’s death over a radio program. But to hear, to see the national coverage, it has to be random, and it has to be somebody who looks like us. I always said when the "that could happen to me" syndrome kicks in, that’s when there’s coverage. That’s when there is investigation and prosecution. That’s when you see more heavy sentences coming to bear. And, you know, I’m writing a piece now that is tentatively titled "The Color of Life," because we, as a society, place differing values on differing lives according to race, gender, socioeconomic status and all of that.

AMYGOODMAN: Goldie Taylor, we want to thank you very much for being with us, MSNBC contributor, managing editor of "The Goldie Taylor Project," where she writes about contemporary social and political issues — her website is goldietaylorproject.com — speaking to us from Atlanta.

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Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500One Billion Rising: Eve Ensler, Activists Worldwide Plan Global Strike to End Violence Against Womenhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/24/one_billion_rising_eve_ensler_activists
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-24:en/story/8a2eb1 AMY GOODMAN : We turn now to our last segment: One Billion Rising campaign. That is the name of the campaign, violence against women as a global pandemic. And the woman who is leading this team is Eve Ensler.
I want to turn right now, as we talk about this latest election season in the United States, last month Republican Congressmember Todd Akin, running for the Senate in Missouri, sparked national outrage for comments on rape and abortion. Asked by a reporter why he opposes abortion even in cases of rape, Congressman Akin said, in cases of what he called &quot;legitimate rape,&quot; women&#8217;s bodies shut down, and they don&#8217;t get pregnant. He&#8217;s running for the seat of the incumbent Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill.
Against this backdrop, we turn now to the worldwide initiative to end violence against women and girls, known as V-Day, and its global campaign called One Billion Rising. The person leading the campaign, Eve Ensler, who wrote an open letter in protest against Congressman Akin&#8217;s statement and who is joining us on this program. Thousands of organizations across the world have already joined her One Billion Rising campaign. This is activist and actress Rosario Dawson.
ROSARIO DAWSON : I&#8217;m rising because one in three women will be raped, killed or beaten in her lifetime. We compose the majority of the planet. I think it&#8217;s scary and insane to imagine that women&#8217;s issues and girls&#8217; issues are a side issue. And as long as we continue to not stand up and rise and make it the thing that is at the forefront, we&#8217;re going to see every other issue before us continue to fail.
AMY GOODMAN : Rosario Dawson, the actress, activist, supporter of the One Billion Rising initiative. To talk more about the campaign and women&#8217;s issues worldwide, we&#8217;re joined by Eve Ensler, award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues . Her newest play, Emotional Creature , opens in New York in November.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!
EVE ENSLER : Thanks. Happy to be here.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s great to have you with us. So, talk about what&#8217;s happening on February 14th, 2013.
EVE ENSLER : Well, I&#8217;m really—I&#8217;m blown away. You know, we started this campaign a few months ago. We began to put it out into the world. And we have a lot of amazing activists, as you know, across the planet who have begun to work on this. And today we&#8217;re launching the new website. We have over 5,000 groups across the world signed up. We have 161 countries. We have movement builders. We have movie stars. We have ministers. It&#8217;s across the board.
And I think what&#8217;s most exciting is to see how quickly this is spreading. I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world right now, the fact that we&#8217;re seeing this incredible pushback against women in many places in the world, at the same time as women know that that&#8217;s not possible anymore. Like, we&#8217;ve come too far for the pushback. So I think there&#8217;s this incredible energy, this synergy happening right now.
And I think one of the things we&#8217;ve been seeing—we just had a fantastic summit in Nairobi, a V-Africa Summit, the first one we&#8217;ve ever had, with 50 activists from 18 countries across the continent. And what was just wonderfully hopeful was to see how many women in Africa, grassroots women on the front lines, are doing the most incredible work.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to one clip, the One Billion Rising campaign gaining many supporters worldwide. This is Isatou Touray from The Gambia.
ISATOU TOURAY : I am rising because I feel it is fundamental that everybody joins this campaign of V-Day to rise against violence against women. It must not be condoned. It must not be recognized and respected, because it affects the very core of the female dignity, integrity and also the rights of the person in all its entirety. So, rising up to it and making it known in the public is another way of stopping violence. We must not condone violence. We must not keep it under the carpet. And we must talk. The culture of silence must end in the fight against violence against women.
AMY GOODMAN : Your response?
EVE ENSLER : Well, Isatou Touray is an unbelievably fierce woman in The Gambia who has been fighting female genital mutilation for many years and has actually ended it in four out of the seven provinces. And they wrote today to say that they would be dancing and rising to make sure it&#8217;s ended in all the provinces. She just got out of prison, as a matter of fact, for fighting FGM and for being—
AMY GOODMAN : FGM being female genital mutilation.
EVE ENSLER : Yeah, female genital mutilation. And she has been fighting against early marriage and girls being shut down and obviously their bodies being cut. But we&#8217;re seeing all different women. I got a wonderful email two days ago from women in the Philippines. And this is in the tribe called Blaan in a region of indigenous women who are being displaced because of large-scale mining from multinationals. And they will be dancing and rising to take back their lands, because the military has been using sexual abuse to get them off their lands. So, in every place in the world, people are now writing in and sending us their videos, sending us their stories about why they&#8217;re rising in their particular community. And what we&#8217;re seeing—and if you go on the website today and see—
AMY GOODMAN : Your website is?
EVE ENSLER : Onebillionrising.org —and you look at the thousands of grassroots groups in the world, you begin to see what a huge movement we are. But we&#8217;ve never been organized or framed as such. And I think this action to rise and dance, to shake the planet back into sense, will be the first really major world action that&#8217;s ever happened where women and men have joined together to understand that violence against women is one of the central issues of our time.
AMY GOODMAN : So, here we are back in the United States in election season. You wrote an open letter in response to Congressman Todd Akin. The famous clip that has been shown all over is him being interviewed by a local reporter, and he says that women who are legitimately raped don&#8217;t get pregnant. What was the letter you wrote?
EVE ENSLER : Well, I was actually in Bukavu, Congo, at that time, where I was at City of Joy, where we work with raped women and women who have suffered enormous violence from the war, from sexual violence. And I could not believe that I was reading a person in the United States who legislates law, who was talking about the fact there was such a thing as &quot;legitimate rape&quot; and that it wouldn&#8217;t—you know, wouldn&#8217;t make you pregnant. And it was so shocking to the people in the Congo that something like this was being said in the United States.
So I basically—I think what it really indicated and what my letter was speaking out and saying was that what it said was how little he and so many people of his party and ilk understand about sexual violence and rape. To say—even to make a distinction between illegitimate and legitimate rape would be an indication that you know nothing about rape or what it feels like to have been raped and the consequences of that violence on your body. And I think there is some kind of massive either ignorance or refusal to understand the massive amount of violence against women, but also the profound ongoing fight that women have to have in their lives once they&#8217;ve been violated. And the fact that Todd Akin is somebody representing the Republican Party could say—I mean, what is there? Good sperm and—I just had this image of, oh, it&#8217;s bad sperm. It just kind of explodes before it makes you pregnant, like as if, you know—and again, it&#8217;s on to the woman&#8217;s body, right, to know the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sperm, right? And I think that—the kind of idiocy of that and the madness of that reflects the extreme pushback mentality that&#8217;s been coming from the Republican Party over the last months.
AMY GOODMAN : You have done a lot of work in Congo, V-Day work with UNICEF , to organize events in two cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where survivors of sexual violence publicly spoke out against violence and about their experiences for the first time. Seven women told their stories in front of community members and government and U.N. officials. We want to play a clip.
SURVIVOR 1: [translated] When they took my husband and hit him and tied him and tortured him and took him I don&#8217;t know where, they went and killed him wherever they had taken him. And then all seven men raped me. Then the neighbors heard what happened and found me unconscious. They looked at me and saw all my insides outside of my body.
SURVIVOR 2: [translated] They started taking the clothes off my children, and I told them, &quot;Please, excuse me, you can&#8217;t do that. Instead of raping my children while I watch, just kill me first.&quot;
SURVIVOR 3: [translated] A woman is supposed to be respected. We are not objects. Women get pregnant and breast-feed you. How come you disrespect me today in public?
SURVIVOR 4: [translated] The authorities of this country, how do you look at this rape issue and remain silent?
SURVIVOR 1: [translated] We are suffering because of rape. Rape should stop. It must stop.
SURVIVOR 5: [translated] I am speaking so that women who are hiding and others who have AIDS can come out, so they can be taught how to live.
AMY GOODMAN : These are women that you&#8217;ve been working with, Eve, in the Congo. Fit this into Billions Rising.
EVE ENSLER : Well, there are, at this point on the planet—it&#8217;s a U.N. statistic—one out of three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That&#8217;s one billion women, at least, on the planet. One billion women. And when I think about the women in the Congo who I work with a lot—I just was there for the month of August—you know, at City of Joy, who are now transforming the horrible pain they&#8217;ve been through because of a war that&#8217;s being fought for minerals—
AMY GOODMAN : And the City of Joy that you helped build, explain it.
EVE ENSLER : That V-Day helped build and V-Day is running now with our director, our Congolese director, Christine Schuler Deschryver, and a team of Congolese women. It&#8217;s run by the Congolese. It&#8217;s owned by the Congolese. And it&#8217;s a place where pain is being turned to power and where women are being healed and where they&#8217;re becoming leaders of their country.
AMY GOODMAN : These are victims of rape.
EVE ENSLER : All victims of the war and victims of rape, and survivors of both and amazingly fierce women. But what I have seen there and what I&#8217;ve seen across the planet for the last 15 years is a pandemic of rape and a pandemic where once a woman is raped, you spend your entire life recovering from that act. So the fact that a Todd Akin, the fact that anyone could begin to parcel out language rather than ending the rape—you know, why don&#8217;t we end the rape rather than dispute language around rape?
And I think One Billion Rising is basically saying the time has come for women across the planet, and the men who love them, to do an outrageous, disruptive dance action that makes it so clear how many women have been raped, that it&#8217;s not tribal or religious or based on your country or based on your town, it actually is patriarchy, and it&#8217;s everywhere, and that if we rise together, we will understand it concerns us all.
AMY GOODMAN : Eve Ensler, I want to thank you for being with us. The website is onebillionrising.org . Award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues . And very happy to have you in studio looking as healthy as you are, as you have battled cancer, as well. Amazing that you are organizing this massive global event.
And that does it for our show. We&#8217;re still on the 100-city tour . It continues Wednesday in Storrs, Connecticut , University of Connecticut Student Union Theater at 7:30; then Thursday in Arlington, Virginia , at George Mason University&#8217;s Founder&#8217;s Hall, Room 125; on Friday night in Charlottesville, Virginia , at 7:00 p.m., Nau Auditorium South Lawn Commons, University of Virginia; then 1:00 p.m., Green Fest on Saturday in Washington, D.C. ; then the Baltimore Book Fest at 7:00 on Saturday; on Sunday in Richmond, Virginia ; 7:00 p.m. in Norfolk, Virginia ; and we&#8217;re wrapping up our Virginia leg at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg on Monday night, before leaving to Denver for the first presidential debate. AMYGOODMAN: We turn now to our last segment: One Billion Rising campaign. That is the name of the campaign, violence against women as a global pandemic. And the woman who is leading this team is Eve Ensler.

I want to turn right now, as we talk about this latest election season in the United States, last month Republican Congressmember Todd Akin, running for the Senate in Missouri, sparked national outrage for comments on rape and abortion. Asked by a reporter why he opposes abortion even in cases of rape, Congressman Akin said, in cases of what he called "legitimate rape," women’s bodies shut down, and they don’t get pregnant. He’s running for the seat of the incumbent Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill.

Against this backdrop, we turn now to the worldwide initiative to end violence against women and girls, known as V-Day, and its global campaign called One Billion Rising. The person leading the campaign, Eve Ensler, who wrote an open letter in protest against Congressman Akin’s statement and who is joining us on this program. Thousands of organizations across the world have already joined her One Billion Rising campaign. This is activist and actress Rosario Dawson.

ROSARIODAWSON: I’m rising because one in three women will be raped, killed or beaten in her lifetime. We compose the majority of the planet. I think it’s scary and insane to imagine that women’s issues and girls’ issues are a side issue. And as long as we continue to not stand up and rise and make it the thing that is at the forefront, we’re going to see every other issue before us continue to fail.

AMYGOODMAN: Rosario Dawson, the actress, activist, supporter of the One Billion Rising initiative. To talk more about the campaign and women’s issues worldwide, we’re joined by Eve Ensler, award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues. Her newest play, Emotional Creature, opens in New York in November.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!

EVEENSLER: Thanks. Happy to be here.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. So, talk about what’s happening on February 14th, 2013.

EVEENSLER: Well, I’m really—I’m blown away. You know, we started this campaign a few months ago. We began to put it out into the world. And we have a lot of amazing activists, as you know, across the planet who have begun to work on this. And today we’re launching the new website. We have over 5,000 groups across the world signed up. We have 161 countries. We have movement builders. We have movie stars. We have ministers. It’s across the board.

And I think what’s most exciting is to see how quickly this is spreading. I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world right now, the fact that we’re seeing this incredible pushback against women in many places in the world, at the same time as women know that that’s not possible anymore. Like, we’ve come too far for the pushback. So I think there’s this incredible energy, this synergy happening right now.

And I think one of the things we’ve been seeing—we just had a fantastic summit in Nairobi, a V-Africa Summit, the first one we’ve ever had, with 50 activists from 18 countries across the continent. And what was just wonderfully hopeful was to see how many women in Africa, grassroots women on the front lines, are doing the most incredible work.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn to one clip, the One Billion Rising campaign gaining many supporters worldwide. This is Isatou Touray from The Gambia.

ISATOUTOURAY: I am rising because I feel it is fundamental that everybody joins this campaign of V-Day to rise against violence against women. It must not be condoned. It must not be recognized and respected, because it affects the very core of the female dignity, integrity and also the rights of the person in all its entirety. So, rising up to it and making it known in the public is another way of stopping violence. We must not condone violence. We must not keep it under the carpet. And we must talk. The culture of silence must end in the fight against violence against women.

AMYGOODMAN: Your response?

EVEENSLER: Well, Isatou Touray is an unbelievably fierce woman in The Gambia who has been fighting female genital mutilation for many years and has actually ended it in four out of the seven provinces. And they wrote today to say that they would be dancing and rising to make sure it’s ended in all the provinces. She just got out of prison, as a matter of fact, for fighting FGM and for being—

AMYGOODMAN:FGM being female genital mutilation.

EVEENSLER: Yeah, female genital mutilation. And she has been fighting against early marriage and girls being shut down and obviously their bodies being cut. But we’re seeing all different women. I got a wonderful email two days ago from women in the Philippines. And this is in the tribe called Blaan in a region of indigenous women who are being displaced because of large-scale mining from multinationals. And they will be dancing and rising to take back their lands, because the military has been using sexual abuse to get them off their lands. So, in every place in the world, people are now writing in and sending us their videos, sending us their stories about why they’re rising in their particular community. And what we’re seeing—and if you go on the website today and see—

AMYGOODMAN: Your website is?

EVEENSLER:Onebillionrising.org—and you look at the thousands of grassroots groups in the world, you begin to see what a huge movement we are. But we’ve never been organized or framed as such. And I think this action to rise and dance, to shake the planet back into sense, will be the first really major world action that’s ever happened where women and men have joined together to understand that violence against women is one of the central issues of our time.

AMYGOODMAN: So, here we are back in the United States in election season. You wrote an open letter in response to Congressman Todd Akin. The famous clip that has been shown all over is him being interviewed by a local reporter, and he says that women who are legitimately raped don’t get pregnant. What was the letter you wrote?

EVEENSLER: Well, I was actually in Bukavu, Congo, at that time, where I was at City of Joy, where we work with raped women and women who have suffered enormous violence from the war, from sexual violence. And I could not believe that I was reading a person in the United States who legislates law, who was talking about the fact there was such a thing as "legitimate rape" and that it wouldn’t—you know, wouldn’t make you pregnant. And it was so shocking to the people in the Congo that something like this was being said in the United States.

So I basically—I think what it really indicated and what my letter was speaking out and saying was that what it said was how little he and so many people of his party and ilk understand about sexual violence and rape. To say—even to make a distinction between illegitimate and legitimate rape would be an indication that you know nothing about rape or what it feels like to have been raped and the consequences of that violence on your body. And I think there is some kind of massive either ignorance or refusal to understand the massive amount of violence against women, but also the profound ongoing fight that women have to have in their lives once they’ve been violated. And the fact that Todd Akin is somebody representing the Republican Party could say—I mean, what is there? Good sperm and—I just had this image of, oh, it’s bad sperm. It just kind of explodes before it makes you pregnant, like as if, you know—and again, it’s on to the woman’s body, right, to know the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sperm, right? And I think that—the kind of idiocy of that and the madness of that reflects the extreme pushback mentality that’s been coming from the Republican Party over the last months.

AMYGOODMAN: You have done a lot of work in Congo, V-Day work with UNICEF, to organize events in two cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where survivors of sexual violence publicly spoke out against violence and about their experiences for the first time. Seven women told their stories in front of community members and government and U.N. officials. We want to play a clip.

SURVIVOR 1: [translated] When they took my husband and hit him and tied him and tortured him and took him I don’t know where, they went and killed him wherever they had taken him. And then all seven men raped me. Then the neighbors heard what happened and found me unconscious. They looked at me and saw all my insides outside of my body.

SURVIVOR 2: [translated] They started taking the clothes off my children, and I told them, "Please, excuse me, you can’t do that. Instead of raping my children while I watch, just kill me first."

SURVIVOR 3: [translated] A woman is supposed to be respected. We are not objects. Women get pregnant and breast-feed you. How come you disrespect me today in public?

SURVIVOR 4: [translated] The authorities of this country, how do you look at this rape issue and remain silent?

SURVIVOR 1: [translated] We are suffering because of rape. Rape should stop. It must stop.

SURVIVOR 5: [translated] I am speaking so that women who are hiding and others who have AIDS can come out, so they can be taught how to live.

AMYGOODMAN: These are women that you’ve been working with, Eve, in the Congo. Fit this into Billions Rising.

EVEENSLER: Well, there are, at this point on the planet—it’s a U.N. statistic—one out of three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That’s one billion women, at least, on the planet. One billion women. And when I think about the women in the Congo who I work with a lot—I just was there for the month of August—you know, at City of Joy, who are now transforming the horrible pain they’ve been through because of a war that’s being fought for minerals—

AMYGOODMAN: And the City of Joy that you helped build, explain it.

EVEENSLER: That V-Day helped build and V-Day is running now with our director, our Congolese director, Christine Schuler Deschryver, and a team of Congolese women. It’s run by the Congolese. It’s owned by the Congolese. And it’s a place where pain is being turned to power and where women are being healed and where they’re becoming leaders of their country.

AMYGOODMAN: These are victims of rape.

EVEENSLER: All victims of the war and victims of rape, and survivors of both and amazingly fierce women. But what I have seen there and what I’ve seen across the planet for the last 15 years is a pandemic of rape and a pandemic where once a woman is raped, you spend your entire life recovering from that act. So the fact that a Todd Akin, the fact that anyone could begin to parcel out language rather than ending the rape—you know, why don’t we end the rape rather than dispute language around rape?

And I think One Billion Rising is basically saying the time has come for women across the planet, and the men who love them, to do an outrageous, disruptive dance action that makes it so clear how many women have been raped, that it’s not tribal or religious or based on your country or based on your town, it actually is patriarchy, and it’s everywhere, and that if we rise together, we will understand it concerns us all.

AMYGOODMAN: Eve Ensler, I want to thank you for being with us. The website is onebillionrising.org. Award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues. And very happy to have you in studio looking as healthy as you are, as you have battled cancer, as well. Amazing that you are organizing this massive global event.

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Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400One Billion Rising: V-Day's Eve Ensler Launches Global Day of Action, Dance Against Women's Violencehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/2/one_billion_rising_v_days_eve
tag:democracynow.org,2012-03-02:en/story/ca2da6 JUAN GONZALEZ : Republicans are not only challenging women&#8217;s reproductive rights but also the reauthorization of a formerly uncontroversial bill know as the Violence Against Women Act. The landmark federal law comes up for reauthorization roughly every five years and has enjoyed bipartisan support since President Clinton first signed it in 1994. However, in February, all of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the bill when it came up for consideration. Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa led the effort to oppose the bill&#8217;s provisions ensuring greater protection for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans on tribal land. The measure ultimately passed out of committee on a 10-to-8 party-line vote.
The Violence Against Women Act was designed to offer federal funding for the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence, while bringing public awareness to the issue. This year, reauthorization of the bill would place greater emphasis on reducing domestic homicides and sexual assault, as well as strengthen housing protections for domestic violence survivors. Since the bill was first enacted, reporting of domestic violence increased by more than 50 percent.
AMY GOODMAN : Against this backdrop, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, known as V-Day, has just launched a new global campaign called &quot;One Billion Rising.&quot; The founder of V-Day, the Tony Award-winning playwright and activist Eve Ensler, announced her new campaign on CNN&#8217;s Connect the World .
EVE ENSLER : What we&#8217;ve decided, moving into our 15th anniversary, is that we are launching a campaign called One Billion Rising. It will be a campaign where next V-Day, February 14th, 2013, we are calling for, inviting, challenging one billion women, and all the people who love them—and we hope many men will join this campaign—to walk off their jobs, walk out of their schools, walk out of their homes, and gather in fields, stadiums, churches, blocks, wherever, beaches, and dance, until the violence stops. We need to do something that&#8217;s dramatic and urgent, where women can see their numbers, see the epidemic proportions of violence against women, and understand that it is indeed one of the central issues of our times.
AMY GOODMAN : Eve Ensler of V-Day, announcing her new campaign, One Billion Rising.
In addition to founding V-Day, Eve Ensler is the bestselling author and playwright behind The Vagina Monologues . Her latest book is a collection of fictional monologues and stories inspired by girls; it&#8217;s called I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World . Eve Ensler has also been awarded the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her commitment to humanitarian and charitable efforts around her V-Day organizing around the world. And she&#8217;s also the director of City of Joy, a groundbreaking new community for women survivors of gender violence in Congo. Created from their vision, Congolese women run, operate and direct City of Joy themselves.
Eve Ensler, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Not sure which one to begin on, but let&#8217;s go there, the last, City of Joy.
EVE ENSLER : I&#8217;m actually not the director of City of Joy. Christine Schuler Deschryver is the director. I just want to clarify that. One of the great things, I think, about City of Joy is it&#8217;s fully run and directed and owned by the Congolese. I simply find funds in the world to keep their mission and their purpose alive.
And I&#8217;m really happy to say I just was there for the month of January in Bukavu, where we had the first graduating class, which was a pilot class of 41 women. All of the women who are at City of Joy have suffered gender violence, and fairly extreme gender violence, and arrived six months earlier very traumatized, coming from villages where often women have seen the worst conflict with very little support, in villages and in the bush, where, you know, they have very little access and very little safety and very little protection and security. And I think we&#8217;re seeing some of the worst cases arrive from eastern Congo, women who have suffered gang rapes and attacks on villages, attacks on their bodies, the likes of which I don&#8217;t think most of us can even imagine. But the good news is that they arrive traumatized, some with bullet holes literally in their heads, some missing parts of their bodies after being gang-raped, and through the amazing programs at City of Joy, through both therapy, which involves dance and theater and telling their stories and releasing their trauma through education, you know, literacy, learning English, learning self-defense, taking civics courses, taking communication courses, learning agriculture, it&#8217;s quite astounding what&#8217;s happened with the women. And I was at the graduation in January, where 41 women, who arrived traumatized and really, many of them, unable to sleep, having seriously bad nightmares, some aggressive because of the horrible trauma that was done to them, were some of the most powerful, articulate, passionate leaders I&#8217;ve ever seen. And they are now back in their communities, each with $100, a cell phone and a posse, in their communities basically spreading what they&#8217;ve learned, teaching women in their communities what their rights are, teaching them what they&#8217;re entitled to.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, in 2008, V-Day worked with UNICEF to organize events in the DRC , where survivors of sexual violence publicly spoke out against violence and about their experiences for the first time. Seven women told their stories in front of community members and government and U.N. officials.
SURVIVOR 1: [translated] When they took my husband and hit him and tied him and tortured him and took him I don&#8217;t know where, they went and killed him wherever they had taken him. And then all seven men raped me. Then the neighbors heard what happened and found me unconscious. They looked at me and saw all my insides outside of my body.
SURVIVOR 2: [translated] They started taking the clothes off my children, and I told them, &quot;Please, excuse me, you can&#8217;t do that. Instead of raping my children while I watch, just kill me first.&quot;
SURVIVOR 3: [translated] A woman is supposed to be respected. We are not objects. Women get pregnant and breast-feed you. How come you disrespect me today in public?
SURVIVOR 4: [translated] The authorities of this country, how do you look at this rape issue and remain silent?
SURVIVOR 1: [translated] We are suffering because of rape. Rape should stop. It must stop.
SURVIVOR 5: [translated] I am speaking so that women who are hiding and others who have AIDS can come out, so they can be taught how to live.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, Eve, you&#8217;ve had this enormous success at the grassroots level in terms of providing the chance for this kind of organization to go on. What&#8217;s been the response of the authorities in the Congo and the government officials to this movement?
EVE ENSLER : Well, you know, it&#8217;s interesting coming back to this country after being in Congo. I feel in some ways that the Congolese government, the local governments are actually more responsive to the liberation of women and women coming into their rights than what we&#8217;re seeing in our Congress. I&#8217;m kind of stunned what&#8217;s happening in America right now, that we&#8217;re fighting over birth control? I mean, what are we modeling to the rest of the world? It&#8217;s appalling.
I&#8217;ll tell you a wonderful story. The governor of the Kivus was at our graduation. And, I mean, one of the things that&#8217;s happening in City of Joy is that women are turning pain to power and becoming leaders. And he witnessed the whole graduation, where women were giving speeches and demonstrating self-defense moves which they had learned and doing poetry in English from Swahili that they had memorized. And at the end, he gave this incredible speech, where he named each woman, in particular, and talked about who they had become. And the next day, he called us, and he just couldn&#8217;t—he couldn&#8217;t sleep. He just was blown away. And he actually said to the director, Christine, &quot;You know, I don&#8217;t think I realized before this moment what value the Congolese had, what value we had.&quot; These are some of the poorest women in the country, and they&#8217;re the greatest leaders now, and they&#8217;re standing, and they&#8217;re putting—and I think there&#8217;s been incredible response on the local level to see the transformation of women, grassroots women, who could in fact lead, possibly, Congo out of the terrible situation it&#8217;s in right now.
And I think I&#8217;ve been very—I just have been very excited to see all of the response around in Congo. For example, the performances women are doing of The Vagina Monologues , the speaking out about sexual rights, the demanding of healthcare, the demanding of birth control. We have a wonderful doctor, Mukwege, who is actually a pastor, I&#8217;d like to point out, who was able to give women birth control when they left City of Joy, so that they would protect themselves and be able to rule their own destinies and bodies when they return to their own villages. And to come home and now see our own Congress dictating what women can and cannot do with their bodies and with birth control and with contraception and with—is rather stunning.
AMY GOODMAN : You wrote a piece called &quot;Over It&quot; that has gone viral, and I was wondering if you would read it for us here.
EVE ENSLER : I would be happy to read it.
&#8220;I am over rape.
&#8220;I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.
&#8220;I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.
&#8220;I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don&#8217;t have a sense of humor, and women don&#8217;t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really, really funny. We just don&#8217;t think that uninvited penises up our vaginas are a laugh riot.
&#8220;I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.
&#8220;I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia and Burma and Pakistan and South Africa and Guatemala and Sierra Leone and Haiti and Afghanistan and Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.
&#8220;I am over three women in the U.S military—one out of three women—getting raped by their so-called &#39;comrades.&#39;
&#8220;I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to abortion.
&#8220;I am over women rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.
&#8220;I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.
&#8220;I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it&#8217;s their fault or they did something to make it happen.
&#8220;I am over violence against women not being a #1 priority internationally and nationally when one out of three women in the world will be raped or beaten in her lifetime &mdash; the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.
&#8220;No women, no future, duh.
&#8220;I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what they want, who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.
&#8220;I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters &mdash; film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes &mdash; while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.
&#8220;I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?
&#8220;You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren&#8217;t you standing with us? Why aren&#8217;t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?
&#8220;I am over years and years of being over rape.
&#8220;And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was raped when I was 5 years old.
&#8220;And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.
&#8220;And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.
&#8220;I am over being polite about rape. It&#8217;s been too long now, we have been too understanding.
&#8220;We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, and UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine &mdash; once and for all &mdash; what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, and your soul shattered. You need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
&#8220;There are approximately one billion women on the planet, one billion women on the planet, who have been violated.
&#8220; ONE BILLION WOMEN .
&quot;The time is now.&quot;
On February 14, 2013, we are calling one billion women, and all the men and people who love them, to walk out of their jobs, to walk out of their homes, to walk out of their schools, to walk out and strike and to find your group, find your posse, find your friends, find your stadium, and dance and dance, until the violence stops. Because we are over it.
AMY GOODMAN : Eve Ensler, &quot;Over It.&quot; So, finally, One Billion Rising, talk about what the plan is.
EVE ENSLER : You know, it&#8217;s 14 years since we&#8217;ve been doing this work in V-Day, and I really believed we would end violence by now. I really did. I wanted that to be true. I am now seeing around the world the levels of violence, the insipid pushback against women&#8217;s rights everywhere. We haven&#8217;t ended patriarchy. We are still here. Patriarchy is still—the fact that, you know, we are still fighting in 2012 for birth control just seems—it&#8217;s hard to even articulate. The fact is, we have not busted this notion that the father still dominates in his authority over women and children and determines the rights of our lives, determines the rights of our futures and our bodies. We have to go further. We have to escalate. If we&#8217;re going to win this battle, if we&#8217;re going to actually free women, which is freeing men, which is allowing everybody a life of dignity and grace, and not walking in fear and terror, but—we have to go further and be disruptive and be dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN : So it&#8217;s one billion dancing?
EVE ENSLER : One billion dancing, wherever you are. I was in Australia when we announced it, and the Aboriginal women have already gotten their stadiums in Queensland. They&#8217;ll be dancing to Whitney Houston. All around the world—in Oklahoma, the Native women are going to be dancing to &quot;Footloose.&quot; Everybody&#8217;s calling me with these wild and amazing ideas. In hours, 118 countries, thousands of people signed up. And I know we can get a billion people, a billion women, out on the streets, in the parks, in the deserts, in the fields, dancing, to say the time has come where women know that violence is over, and men join us in that struggle.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And those who want to join, where can they—what site could they go to?
EVE ENSLER : Vday.org . Come and sign up to be part of the one billion. You can send in your stories eventually. You can tell us what music you&#8217;re dancing to, who you&#8217;re dancing with, what you&#8217;re wearing when you dance. But the main thing is to know that if there are a billion of us who are all survivors, that&#8217;s a lot of people. We have the numbers. We have the majority. And if we are willing to be daring and bold, we can push it to the next level.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Eve Ensler, we want to thank you very much for being with us. I was very amused yesterday when you talked about your experience of being in airports, in wherever, and people coming up to you, and what they&#8217;ve said to you has changed.
EVE ENSLER : Yes, it has. The people used to come up to me and say, &quot;Oh, my god! I&#8217;ve seen your play, The Vagina Monologues .&quot; Now they come up, and they say, &quot;I&#8217;ve been in your play.&quot; I did the plot. It was wonderful. So I really kind of love the idea that eventually we&#8217;ll just have a collective performance of The Vagina Monologues up. I hope so.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, maybe that is February 14th, 2013.
EVE ENSLER : Indeed, the rising.
AMY GOODMAN : Eve Ensler, thanks so much for being with us. Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the global movement to stop violence against women and girls. The new campaign is called One Billion Rising. You can go to vday.org .
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock &#39;n&#39; Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights . Stay with us. JUANGONZALEZ: Republicans are not only challenging women’s reproductive rights but also the reauthorization of a formerly uncontroversial bill know as the Violence Against Women Act. The landmark federal law comes up for reauthorization roughly every five years and has enjoyed bipartisan support since President Clinton first signed it in 1994. However, in February, all of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the bill when it came up for consideration. Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa led the effort to oppose the bill’s provisions ensuring greater protection for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans on tribal land. The measure ultimately passed out of committee on a 10-to-8 party-line vote.

The Violence Against Women Act was designed to offer federal funding for the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence, while bringing public awareness to the issue. This year, reauthorization of the bill would place greater emphasis on reducing domestic homicides and sexual assault, as well as strengthen housing protections for domestic violence survivors. Since the bill was first enacted, reporting of domestic violence increased by more than 50 percent.

AMYGOODMAN: Against this backdrop, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, known as V-Day, has just launched a new global campaign called "One Billion Rising." The founder of V-Day, the Tony Award-winning playwright and activist Eve Ensler, announced her new campaign on CNN’s Connect the World.

EVEENSLER: What we’ve decided, moving into our 15th anniversary, is that we are launching a campaign called One Billion Rising. It will be a campaign where next V-Day, February 14th, 2013, we are calling for, inviting, challenging one billion women, and all the people who love them—and we hope many men will join this campaign—to walk off their jobs, walk out of their schools, walk out of their homes, and gather in fields, stadiums, churches, blocks, wherever, beaches, and dance, until the violence stops. We need to do something that’s dramatic and urgent, where women can see their numbers, see the epidemic proportions of violence against women, and understand that it is indeed one of the central issues of our times.

AMYGOODMAN: Eve Ensler of V-Day, announcing her new campaign, One Billion Rising.

In addition to founding V-Day, Eve Ensler is the bestselling author and playwright behind The Vagina Monologues. Her latest book is a collection of fictional monologues and stories inspired by girls; it’s called I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. Eve Ensler has also been awarded the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her commitment to humanitarian and charitable efforts around her V-Day organizing around the world. And she’s also the director of City of Joy, a groundbreaking new community for women survivors of gender violence in Congo. Created from their vision, Congolese women run, operate and direct City of Joy themselves.

Eve Ensler, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Not sure which one to begin on, but let’s go there, the last, City of Joy.

EVEENSLER: I’m actually not the director of City of Joy. Christine Schuler Deschryver is the director. I just want to clarify that. One of the great things, I think, about City of Joy is it’s fully run and directed and owned by the Congolese. I simply find funds in the world to keep their mission and their purpose alive.

And I’m really happy to say I just was there for the month of January in Bukavu, where we had the first graduating class, which was a pilot class of 41 women. All of the women who are at City of Joy have suffered gender violence, and fairly extreme gender violence, and arrived six months earlier very traumatized, coming from villages where often women have seen the worst conflict with very little support, in villages and in the bush, where, you know, they have very little access and very little safety and very little protection and security. And I think we’re seeing some of the worst cases arrive from eastern Congo, women who have suffered gang rapes and attacks on villages, attacks on their bodies, the likes of which I don’t think most of us can even imagine. But the good news is that they arrive traumatized, some with bullet holes literally in their heads, some missing parts of their bodies after being gang-raped, and through the amazing programs at City of Joy, through both therapy, which involves dance and theater and telling their stories and releasing their trauma through education, you know, literacy, learning English, learning self-defense, taking civics courses, taking communication courses, learning agriculture, it’s quite astounding what’s happened with the women. And I was at the graduation in January, where 41 women, who arrived traumatized and really, many of them, unable to sleep, having seriously bad nightmares, some aggressive because of the horrible trauma that was done to them, were some of the most powerful, articulate, passionate leaders I’ve ever seen. And they are now back in their communities, each with $100, a cell phone and a posse, in their communities basically spreading what they’ve learned, teaching women in their communities what their rights are, teaching them what they’re entitled to.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, in 2008, V-Day worked with UNICEF to organize events in the DRC, where survivors of sexual violence publicly spoke out against violence and about their experiences for the first time. Seven women told their stories in front of community members and government and U.N. officials.

SURVIVOR 1: [translated] When they took my husband and hit him and tied him and tortured him and took him I don’t know where, they went and killed him wherever they had taken him. And then all seven men raped me. Then the neighbors heard what happened and found me unconscious. They looked at me and saw all my insides outside of my body.

SURVIVOR 2: [translated] They started taking the clothes off my children, and I told them, "Please, excuse me, you can’t do that. Instead of raping my children while I watch, just kill me first."

SURVIVOR 3: [translated] A woman is supposed to be respected. We are not objects. Women get pregnant and breast-feed you. How come you disrespect me today in public?

SURVIVOR 4: [translated] The authorities of this country, how do you look at this rape issue and remain silent?

SURVIVOR 1: [translated] We are suffering because of rape. Rape should stop. It must stop.

SURVIVOR 5: [translated] I am speaking so that women who are hiding and others who have AIDS can come out, so they can be taught how to live.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, Eve, you’ve had this enormous success at the grassroots level in terms of providing the chance for this kind of organization to go on. What’s been the response of the authorities in the Congo and the government officials to this movement?

EVEENSLER: Well, you know, it’s interesting coming back to this country after being in Congo. I feel in some ways that the Congolese government, the local governments are actually more responsive to the liberation of women and women coming into their rights than what we’re seeing in our Congress. I’m kind of stunned what’s happening in America right now, that we’re fighting over birth control? I mean, what are we modeling to the rest of the world? It’s appalling.

I’ll tell you a wonderful story. The governor of the Kivus was at our graduation. And, I mean, one of the things that’s happening in City of Joy is that women are turning pain to power and becoming leaders. And he witnessed the whole graduation, where women were giving speeches and demonstrating self-defense moves which they had learned and doing poetry in English from Swahili that they had memorized. And at the end, he gave this incredible speech, where he named each woman, in particular, and talked about who they had become. And the next day, he called us, and he just couldn’t—he couldn’t sleep. He just was blown away. And he actually said to the director, Christine, "You know, I don’t think I realized before this moment what value the Congolese had, what value we had." These are some of the poorest women in the country, and they’re the greatest leaders now, and they’re standing, and they’re putting—and I think there’s been incredible response on the local level to see the transformation of women, grassroots women, who could in fact lead, possibly, Congo out of the terrible situation it’s in right now.

And I think I’ve been very—I just have been very excited to see all of the response around in Congo. For example, the performances women are doing of The Vagina Monologues, the speaking out about sexual rights, the demanding of healthcare, the demanding of birth control. We have a wonderful doctor, Mukwege, who is actually a pastor, I’d like to point out, who was able to give women birth control when they left City of Joy, so that they would protect themselves and be able to rule their own destinies and bodies when they return to their own villages. And to come home and now see our own Congress dictating what women can and cannot do with their bodies and with birth control and with contraception and with—is rather stunning.

AMYGOODMAN: You wrote a piece called "Over It" that has gone viral, and I was wondering if you would read it for us here.

EVEENSLER: I would be happy to read it.

“I am over rape.

“I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

“I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.

“I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really, really funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our vaginas are a laugh riot.

“I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.

“I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia and Burma and Pakistan and South Africa and Guatemala and Sierra Leone and Haiti and Afghanistan and Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.

“I am over three women in the U.S military—one out of three women—getting raped by their so-called 'comrades.'

“I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to abortion.

“I am over women rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.

“I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.

“I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.

“I am over violence against women not being a #1 priority internationally and nationally when one out of three women in the world will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.

“No women, no future, duh.

“I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what they want, who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.

“I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters — film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes — while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.

“I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?

“You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

“I am over years and years of being over rape.

“And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was raped when I was 5 years old.

“And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.

“And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.

“I am over being polite about rape. It’s been too long now, we have been too understanding.

“We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, and UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine — once and for all — what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, and your soul shattered. You need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.

“There are approximately one billion women on the planet, one billion women on the planet, who have been violated.

“ONEBILLIONWOMEN.

"The time is now."

On February 14, 2013, we are calling one billion women, and all the men and people who love them, to walk out of their jobs, to walk out of their homes, to walk out of their schools, to walk out and strike and to find your group, find your posse, find your friends, find your stadium, and dance and dance, until the violence stops. Because we are over it.

EVEENSLER: You know, it’s 14 years since we’ve been doing this work in V-Day, and I really believed we would end violence by now. I really did. I wanted that to be true. I am now seeing around the world the levels of violence, the insipid pushback against women’s rights everywhere. We haven’t ended patriarchy. We are still here. Patriarchy is still—the fact that, you know, we are still fighting in 2012 for birth control just seems—it’s hard to even articulate. The fact is, we have not busted this notion that the father still dominates in his authority over women and children and determines the rights of our lives, determines the rights of our futures and our bodies. We have to go further. We have to escalate. If we’re going to win this battle, if we’re going to actually free women, which is freeing men, which is allowing everybody a life of dignity and grace, and not walking in fear and terror, but—we have to go further and be disruptive and be dangerous.

AMYGOODMAN: So it’s one billion dancing?

EVEENSLER: One billion dancing, wherever you are. I was in Australia when we announced it, and the Aboriginal women have already gotten their stadiums in Queensland. They’ll be dancing to Whitney Houston. All around the world—in Oklahoma, the Native women are going to be dancing to "Footloose." Everybody’s calling me with these wild and amazing ideas. In hours, 118 countries, thousands of people signed up. And I know we can get a billion people, a billion women, out on the streets, in the parks, in the deserts, in the fields, dancing, to say the time has come where women know that violence is over, and men join us in that struggle.

JUANGONZALEZ: And those who want to join, where can they—what site could they go to?

EVEENSLER:Vday.org. Come and sign up to be part of the one billion. You can send in your stories eventually. You can tell us what music you’re dancing to, who you’re dancing with, what you’re wearing when you dance. But the main thing is to know that if there are a billion of us who are all survivors, that’s a lot of people. We have the numbers. We have the majority. And if we are willing to be daring and bold, we can push it to the next level.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Eve Ensler, we want to thank you very much for being with us. I was very amused yesterday when you talked about your experience of being in airports, in wherever, and people coming up to you, and what they’ve said to you has changed.

EVEENSLER: Yes, it has. The people used to come up to me and say, "Oh, my god! I’ve seen your play, The Vagina Monologues." Now they come up, and they say, "I’ve been in your play." I did the plot. It was wonderful. So I really kind of love the idea that eventually we’ll just have a collective performance of The Vagina Monologues up. I hope so.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, maybe that is February 14th, 2013.

EVEENSLER: Indeed, the rising.

AMYGOODMAN: Eve Ensler, thanks so much for being with us. Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright, creator of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the global movement to stop violence against women and girls. The new campaign is called One Billion Rising. You can go to vday.org.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Stay with us.

March is Women’s History Month, recognizing women’s central role in society. Unfortunately, violence against women is epidemic in the United States and around the world.

Domestic violence is on the minds of many now, as reports published by The New York Times implicate New York Gov. David Paterson in an alleged attempt to influence a domestic violence case against one of his top aides. The Times reports, based in part on unnamed sources, say that the Paterson aide, David W. Johnson, attacked his girlfriend on Halloween night, Oct. 31, 2009, “choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help.” New York state police from the governor’s personal protection detail contacted the victim, despite having no jurisdiction. Then the governor himself intervened, the Times alleges, asking two aides to contact the victim and to arrange a phone call between him and the victim. The call occurred on Feb. 7 of this year, the night before the victim was to appear in court to request an order of protection from Johnson. She did not appear in court, and the case was dismissed. After the exposé, the governor ended his bid for election and suspended Johnson without pay.

Denise O’Donnell, Paterson’s deputy secretary for public safety and commissioner of the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, resigned last week, saying, “The behavior alleged here is the antithesis of what many of us have spent our entire careers working to build—a legal system that protects victims of domestic violence and brings offenders to justice.” The National Organization for Women, a longtime ally of Paterson, has called on him to resign.

The Paterson scandal follows that of New York state Sen. Hiram Monserrate, who was charged with assaulting a female companion with the jagged edge of a broken glass in December 2008. She later altered her story to conform to Monserrate’s version of events, but the weakened criminal case proceeded against him, without her cooperation, and he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault. He was expelled from the New York Senate last month.

These high-profile cases are sadly symptomatic of a massive problem. The Family Violence Prevention Fund offers this chilling summary of domestic violence in the U.S.: 1 in 4 women report violence at the hands of a current or former spouse or boyfriend at some point in their lives; three women per day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends; women suffer 2 million injuries from intimate-partner violence each year; and there were 248,300 rapes/sexual assaults in 2007, more than 500 per day, up from 190,600 in 2005.

President Barack Obama has reaffirmed October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and stressed the link between the economy and domestic violence: “In the best of economic times, victims worry about finding a job and housing, and providing for their children; these problems only intensify during periods of financial stress.” Sen. Harry Reid said about domestic abuse last week: “It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don’t have jobs. Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they’re out of work, tend to become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed. It’s the way it is all over the country.”
Given the severity of the problem of domestic violence, and its likely exacerbation by the economic crisis, it is hard to believe that so-called health insurance companies actually label a woman’s victimization by domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition.” The term has long been used by health insurance corporations to deny coverage to applicants or, perhaps worse, to retroactively deny coverage to people who suffered from a condition before they were insured.

At Obama’s bipartisan health care summit last week, New York Rep. Louise Slaughter pointed out, “Eight states in this country right now have declared that domestic violence is a pre-existing condition, on the grounds, I assume, that if you’ve been unlucky enough to get yourself beaten up once, you might go round and do it again.”

March 8 is recognized by the United Nations and many countries around the world (but not the U.S.) as International Women’s Day. March is Women’s History Month. Thousands of events are being held around the world to honor women. Let’s start here in the U.S. by making violence against women history.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” an independent, daily global TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in the United States and around the world. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

GOV. DAVIDPATERSON: Today I am announcing that I am ending my campaign for governor of the state of New York. It has become increasingly clear to me in the last few days that I cannot run for office and try to manage the state’s business at the same time, and right now New York state needs a leader who can devote full time to this service. But I give you this personal oath: I have never abused my office — not now, not ever.

AMYGOODMAN: A report in the New York Times alleged that Paterson’s top aide, David Johnson, now suspended, attacked his girlfriend last Halloween, quote, "choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help." On Monday the New York Times reported Governor Paterson had personally intervened in the case, asking two staff members to contact the victim the night before she was to appear in court to request an order of protection from Johnson. She did not show up in court.

In light of these revelations, the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, which has been a longtime ally of Paterson, called on him to resign.

As the pressure rises on Governor Paterson, we take a step back to look at the issue of domestic violence around the country. I’m joined from Washington, DC by Terry O’Neill. She’s the president of the National Organization for Women.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Terry. First —-

TERRY O’NEILL: Thanks, Amy. I’m thrilled to be here.

AMYGOODMAN: It may surprise many that the National Organization for Women, long an ally of Governor Paterson, who has hailed him for his -— well, for his feminism, for supporting women, is now calling for his resignation.

TERRY O’NEILL: Sure, and the New York state NOW chapter made that decision. I’m sure it was not an easy decision for them to make. But the issue of domestic violence is just too important. It’s an issue that the National Organization for Women around the country, we have worked on for decades. And although it may not have been easy, I think it’s the right thing to do.

AMYGOODMAN: You, Terry O’Neill, have come out as a domestic violence survivor.

TERRY O’NEILL: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about how you, yourself, decided to make your ordeal public and what happened to you?

TERRY O’NEILL: Sure. Actually, what happened to me happened a very long time ago. I was in my early twenties. I was newly married, and I was, frankly, in —- I suppose, in the universe of domestic violence, I was quite lucky. Newly married, the marriage wasn’t going well. I told my young husband, you know, “We need to get divorced.” And I experienced what has later become to be called “separation assault,” where it was a little bit like the Chris Brown incident, frankly, an assault done by an individual who was using violence to get what he wants. And in my case, it was he did not want me to leave the marriage.

I had enormous supports available to me. My parents were living in the same town. I moved into their apartment. So I was able to get into a safe space. I was able to continue working. This individual came to my place of employment only once and never came back again. I had everything going for me, so I was very, very lucky. What I have learned from that experience is that it’s crucial that women who are escaping violent relationships must have supports, multiple types of support.

You know, I didn’t go public with this until actually fairly recently, when I was working for a county government in Maryland, and that county was establishing a Family Justice Center dealing with domestic violence. And at that point, I was working with the sheriff’s department, setting up the protocols and so forth, and I thought it might be useful for me to tell them my story, because I wanted them to be very much aware of the self-image, I suppose, of women escaping violence.

The one thing that I remember experiencing in my early twenties was I did not want to be defined by that experience. I repeatedly told my family members, “I am not a battered wife. You know? I am a person who may have a career ahead of her. I am a person who is looking at graduate school. I am” -— it was very important to me to not be labeled as a person who has gone through this experience. So I felt that I could use my experience, as the Montgomery County was setting up this Family Justice Center, to help keep the awareness of the women who are coming to them for help. These are capable, intelligent women who are juggling an enormous number of challenges, more than most women perhaps need to juggle, and that there’s a huge element of, I guess, embarrassment, that women need to be recognized for their capabilities and not just for their, if you would, victimization.

AMYGOODMAN: Last week on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid linked rising unemployment to increased violence against women and girls. This is what he said.

SEN. HARRYREID: I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don’t have jobs. Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they’re out of work, tend to come — become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed. It’s the way it is all over the country.

TERRY O’NEILL: Yeah, and you know, it’s — Senator Reid is absolutely right to talk about the money. When it comes to domestic violence, I think we do need to follow the money, in two ways.

First, in a household in which there is unemployment, the risk of domestic violence is significantly higher than in households where there is full employment. For one thing, when an abusive person is not employed, then the person who’s being abused has a harder time getting away from him. Right? He’s home all the time. He may be drinking. She’s finding it harder to create her safe plan and her means of exit, to get the kids OK, to find an apartment, to gather up the money for the first month’s rent and the security deposit and so forth, all the logistical things you need to do. So he’s home because he’s unemployed, makes it much harder for her to maneuver around to try to get herself and her children into a safe space.

Another piece of the economic issue that’s extremely important to remember is that women who are unemployed or underemployed are at significantly higher risk of domestic violence than women who are full-time employed at fair wages. I don’t think that it is a stretch to connect the dots between systemic wage discrimination against women — right? Women are paid 78 cents to the dollar. In communities of color it’s much worse. African American women are paid 64 cents to the dollar for white men; Latinas, it’s 58 cents. And the economic security of a woman is very much related to her ability to leave an abusive or violent relationship.

So the unemployment situation sort of comes at women with domestic violence issues from these two different perspectives. And I applaud Senator Reid for pointing that out. The thing that I think — the next step that we have to make, now that he makes that connection, we must not decrease expenditures on violence-against-women programs. In fact, when the economy suffers, that’s when public policy, I think, requires that we increase services for women escaping violence.

AMYGOODMAN: During last week’s healthcare summit at Blair House that President Obama presided over, New York Congress member Louise Slaughter noted that domestic violence is considered a pre-existing condition in eight states across the country. This is what she said.

REP. LOUISESLAUGHTER: Pre-existing conditions absolutely has to go. It is cruel. It is capricious. And it is done only to enhance the bottom line. Eight states in this country right now have declared that domestic violence is a pre-existing condition, on the grounds, I assume, that if you’ve been unlucky enough to get yourself beaten up once, you might go around and do it again.

AMYGOODMAN: That was New York Congress member Louise Slaughter. Terry O’Neill, this is just astounding. Explain again what some health insurance companies consider — how they consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition.

TERRY O’NEILL: You know, I’ve never been able to get an explanation of why they do it. I assume it’s because it’s just an effort — it’s one more way of enhancing their bottom line. But it’s absolutely astonishing that —-

AMYGOODMAN: That if a woman’s been -—

TERRY O’NEILL: — a woman who has experienced —-

AMYGOODMAN: Go ahead.

TERRY O’NEILL: She can be -— right, she can be denied insurance completely, no health insurance available on the private market, if the insurance company says, “Oh, well, you’ve been a victim of domestic violence, therefore we’re not going to cover you at all.” And in eight states, the insurance company is permitted to say no coverage of anything. Right?

I don’t know where the insurance — I don’t know if they’re — I can’t imagine that there are statistical studies proving that somehow it is more expensive to insure a person who has been in a domestic violence situation. Clearly, this kind of pre-existing condition should be outlawed, must be outlawed immediately. And yeah, and I think that this is a recent phenomenon of insurance companies simply looking anywhere they can for profit. And this is one way they’ve done it. It’s completely outrageous.

AMYGOODMAN: I’m looking at a report from ABC News, how they describe the latest “controversial abortion bill in Utah meant to prevent planned assaults on unborn children may have opened a loophole that could allow women to be charged with murder if their reckless behavior causes miscarriages.” And on that issue, I wanted to bring in a second guest. Lynn Paltrow is the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

This is an astounding bill and actually also relates to the issue of domestic violence. Can you explain?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, the way the statute is written, any action a woman undertakes, knowingly or recklessly, can result in a charge of homicide with a penalty of fifteen years. So a woman who is pregnant and stays with her batterer is arguably being reckless in staying there. And should she stay there, she could literally be charged with attempted feticide or murder, if there is a — if she survives and the fetus doesn’t. And I think your other guest can talk about why women do stay in those circumstances and why making them criminals for doing so is so unjust.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s really astounding when you play this out, because if a woman is afraid that she might not get health insurance, she won’t let people know that this has happened, Terry O’Neill.

TERRY O’NEILL: Well, sure. She won’t let people know that it has happened. It’s also the case that women who are in abusive relationships need to think carefully about what their options are, where can they go. There are communities where even if there is a shelter, that shelter is full for six months. You can’t get in for six months. So she needs to find — she needs to gather together the money, to move out, to find the apartment. It has to be in a neighborhood that has good schools for her kids and good services for her kids. She needs to be able to find a safe space. She needs to be able to get to a place where he can’t find her.

She needs to be able to go through the legal process to get the restraining order and the permission, in many states. Women who are being battered are not permitted to move to a safer place if it requires her to cross a state line, because he has a legal right to have access to the children. So if she lives, for instance, in Louisiana, as a case I’m familiar with, and a woman who had been battered and had lost her job in Louisiana, her parents in Arkansas said, “Come move in with us, and you can find a job there.” Oh, no, she wasn’t — that was not an option for her. She couldn’t cross state lines because of Louisiana law.

So there are all kinds of constraints on women’s ability to leave that relationship. And then you have Utah coming in and criminalizing her behavior.

How about if we take a step back and look at it from a different perspective and say, “Let’s provide services for women trying to escape violence, let’s provide realistic consequences to men who are violent toward women” — we don’t have nearly the kind of consequences that we need for men who are violent — ”and let’s begin changing the behavior of the men instead of trying to control the sexuality of the women”?

The man, the Utah legislator, as I understand it, who put this law in, he was asked, “Isn’t this really, you know, an anti-abortion measure?” And he said, “Listen, I am totally anti-abortion rights. I don’t want women to have any abortion rights, and I hope that this measure does restrict women’s ability to terminate a pregnancy when they want to.” He said, “I think the” — the Utah — he obviously is one who believes that the Utah legislature has more right to control a woman’s body than the woman herself does.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion, but we have to break for a minute. We’re talking with Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women — she’s in Washington, DC — and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, here in New York. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Our guests today, Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Lynn, I’d like you to talk more about the Utah case. Again, summarize what it says. And then, it is not alone in this country, Utah, in passing laws that have this kind of effect on pregnant women, or considering laws, and I’d like you to go through them.

LYNNPALTROW: OK. Well, the Utah law was ostensibly passed in response to a particular event. And that’s often how anti-choice and fetal rights legislation gets passed, under the guise of “We’re just doing this little thing.” And this little thing is — involved a seventeen-year-old girl who was pregnant, whose boyfriend told her he would leave her if she continued to term. And in some act of absolute desperation, she apparently hired somebody to beat her up to cause her to lose the pregnancy. She survived. The baby survived. They arrested both the young man who beat her up and the young woman. The young man was charged with attempted feticide, and so was she. But when they realized that they really couldn’t apply the attempted feticide law to the girl herself, so outraged were they that they couldn’t lock up a seventeen-year-old for fifteen or more years, that they passed a law that purports to outlaw self-abortions.

First of all, you know, for people who claim to pass laws to promote a culture of life, it’s hard to imagine that, when they don’t value the life of also the life of this young woman. Anybody who is so desperate as to invite violence against herself — and she could have died from the beating — to think that a statute making that behavior a crime is going to deter such desperate behavior is pretty crazy, to begin with, and lacking in any common sense about — if you really want to value fetal life and maternal life, this is certainly not the way to do it.

One of the things the law reveals is that for many, many years, those groups who have been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, have argued that if Roe is overturned, don’t worry, only the doctors are going to go to jail, not the women who, in seeking to control their reproductive lives, have abortions. Well, Utah has just lifted the veil on that, making very clear that women themselves will go to jail and for at least fifteen years, and life, in some circumstances.

But even beyond that, the law is written so broadly that it applies to any behavior a woman engages in knowingly, recklessly. And, you know, who gets to decide if what you’re doing is reckless is the arresting officer and the local prosecutor — not you, your heart, your minister; those people — and put you in jail. So a woman who is unable to leave a batterer could be charged.

Women who — in Iowa, they don’t even have a law like this on the books, but a young woman, after having a terrible argument with her — a husband from whom she was separated, got off the phone and went to go downstairs to see her children and fell down the stairs. She went to the hospital out of concern about her baby, got there, was really upset, hysterical, worried. And they started questioning her. And what they decided was her fall down the stairs was attempted feticide. And they arrested her and kept her in jail for several days, until the Iowa county attorney decided that their unprecedented and, frankly, illegal interpretation of the law couldn’t be applied to her, but only because she was in her second trimester and not her third trimester.

So I think people — when we give examples of women being arrested for staying with a batterer, people think these are slippery slope craziness. But we keep seeing cases like this. In fact, Utah, in 2004, arrested a woman who had given birth to twins, one of whom was stillborn, and they charged her with murder, because she had refused C-section two weeks earlier. And the theory was her refusal of the Caesarian section, Caesarian surgery, constituted murder. So right now there’s a law that’s been passed by both houses in Utah that would make miscarriages and stillbirths, because it applies to pregnant women from the moment they conceive.

One really interesting thing that people need to think about is that it is — people know that if a woman gives birth and then breastfeeds, it’s likely to continue the time where she won’t become pregnant again, while she’s breastfeeding. And apparently, one theory about why that works is that the hormones, that it — breastfeeding affects the body so that the fertilized egg can’t implant. That’s an abortion. That’s self-abortion. So if the state wants to set up a mechanism for policing pregnant women, Utah has done a very good job.

AMYGOODMAN: Louisiana?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, not Louisiana, but Mississippi. We look across the states. We see that our government is in deadlock about passing health insurance for people — healthcare reform for millions of people who need it. But state legislators are hard at work making it harder for pregnant women to access the healthcare they need and more likely for them and their healthcare providers to go to jail.

In Mississippi, there was a bill proposed to criminalize certain kinds of midwifery. The problem with that is, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina and after we saw in Haiti, that if your hospitals shut down, you need people who know how to deliver babies without electronic fetal monitors and surgical theaters and even epidurals. So you really don’t want to be making it a crime for certain kind of midwives to practice. But if a woman in a disaster area can’t access birth services, she also probably can’t access abortion services. And we know if she took measures into her own hands in Utah, she could go to jail for life.

In Nebraska, legislators, in the name of protecting the unborn from pain, argue that fetuses, after twenty weeks, experience pain. And their response to that is to outlaw all second trimester — to ban all second — third trimester abortions and to put the doctors who perform them in jail, even though, to the women who need them, they are heroes. We look at that, and we think, really? If you’re trying — if you believe that twenty-week fetuses experience pain to that extent, wouldn’t they also experience pain from electronic fetal monitors put through their scalps, from forceps deliveries, from pitocin-induced labor? And if your response to fetal pain is to outlaw something, then you’re going to also have to outlaw certain kinds of vaginal birth.

AMYGOODMAN: One of the participants in the Blair House Obama healthcare summit was Oklahoma Senator Coburn. His views on abortion?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, he has said that he believes that doctors who perform abortions should receive the death penalty. And in his state, women who experience stillbirths that have — the state claims was caused by something they did have been charged, in fact, with murder. In every state but South Carolina, and potentially Utah, those prosecutions lack any legal support. And if the woman is lucky enough to be adequately represented, eventually, perhaps years after she’s been in prison, she can get those charges dropped. But South Carolina, as a result of judicial activism, and now Utah, is making it possible to put women behind bars because they are either trying to go to term or because they take desperate measures not to.

AMYGOODMAN: Tom Coburn is a doctor.

LYNNPALTROW: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: And was sued by a woman who charged that he sterilized her without her knowing it, that he had gone in to save her life, really — I think she had an ectopic pregnancy in a fallopian tube, and he removed that, but he removed the good tube, as well.

LYNNPALTROW: Interesting.

AMYGOODMAN: The case ultimately dismissed because she didn’t show up in court.

LYNNPALTROW: Well, we know more and more as Catholic hospitals become the only hospital in town. There are more and more reports of women who go to those hospitals with ectopic pregnancies. Those are pregnancies in fallopian tubes. The embryo can never survive. It’s not a question of an abortion; it’s a question of saving the woman’s life. And recently we got a call from a woman where she was in agonizing pain. The fallopian tube could explode, putting her life at risk. And the Catholic hospital said, “There’s still a heartbeat. Go home and wait.” And so, they force women to suffer unbelievable pain or to travel hundreds of miles to a hospital that will treat them as human beings, not as subjects of religious orthodoxy.

AMYGOODMAN: Is anti-choice legislation on the rise? Have things changed during the Obama years? Or I should say “year.”

LYNNPALTROW: Well, there’s no question. And this was, unfortunately, well predicted, that violence has reemerged — the murder of Dr. Tiller, bombings of clinics — that when the anti-choice movement feels less in power, they increase their violence.

It’s hard to say if there’s more legislation. Every year, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of legislation in the state legislatures are proposed to regulate abortion. And I want to point out that what that means is that all of the other issues of concern about women’s health — breast cancer, heart disease, the rising rate of unnecessary C-sections — none of that gets addressed, because our state legislators will only focus on women’s issues if they are about restricting, in a greater way, access to abortion.

What I think may have changed is a rise in a more openness about what they’re really trying to do. And what they’re really trying to do is, in the guise of barring harm to unborn children, and sometimes they claim harm to pregnant women, what they’re really doing, as in Utah, is trying to put pregnant women behind bars.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Terry O’Neill, as you listen to this discussion on what pregnant women face around the country, the overall issue of how the state deals with women dealing with violence. You talked about training police, sheriffs, around domestic violence. Your final comment?

TERRY O’NEILL: Well, yeah, I think we need far more resources put into programs that end violence against women.

And let me just say one thing that Lynn Paltrow said. You were asking about laws around the country and anti-abortion laws. Even in the United States Congress, in the current health reform laws, we have seen both the House of Representatives and the Senate insert language into the health reform bill that would eventually, to a near certainty, eliminate private insurance coverage for abortion care, as well as public. The Senate bill takes a little longer to fully eliminate all private insurance coverage of abortion care. The House bill does it a lot more quickly. But both have the same ultimate result. So it’s not just in the states; it’s in the United States Congress, as well.

In terms of ending violence against women and ensuring that women have control of their own bodies, I think one of the things we really need to look at is who’s in charge here. We have 17 percent of the United States Congress is women. That’s not critical mass. It certainly isn’t half. And women do account for a little over half of the population of the United States. Five of the United States Supreme Court justices need to be women — period, end of discussion — at minimum, four. Currently, only two of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are women. And I think that women, if we are going to have equal rights, and if we are going to be respected equally as human beings on the same basis as men, we’ve got to get into positions of elected officials, and we’ve got to become the judges of this country, because right now, with male-dominated legislatures and male-dominated and often right-wing-dominated federal courts, we are really seriously being pushed backwards in our rights and our access to justice.

AMYGOODMAN: Terry O’Neill, I want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the National Organization for Women. And thanks, too, to Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Your website?

AMYGOODMAN: And thank you for joining us in Women’s History Month, as well, two women who are making history.]]>

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500Utah Abortion Bill Could Punish Women for Miscarriages, Domestic Violencehttp://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/3/pregnant_women_utah
tag:democracynow.org,2010-03-03:en/story/39cef9 AMY GOODMAN : I’m looking at a report from ABC News, how they describe the latest “controversial abortion bill in Utah meant to prevent planned assaults on unborn children may have opened a loophole that could allow women to be charged with murder if their reckless behavior causes miscarriages.” And on that issue, I wanted to bring in a second guest. Lynn Paltrow is the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
This is an astounding bill and actually also relates to the issue of domestic violence. Can you explain?
LYNN PALTROW : Well, the way the statute is written, any action a woman undertakes, knowingly or recklessly, can result in a charge of homicide with a penalty of fifteen years. So a woman who is pregnant and stays with her batterer is arguably being reckless in staying there. And should she stay there, she could literally be charged with attempted feticide or murder, if there is a &mdash; if she survives and the fetus doesn’t. And I think your other guest can talk about why women do stay in those circumstances and why making them criminals for doing so is so unjust.
AMY GOODMAN : It’s really astounding when you play this out, because if a woman is afraid that she might not get health insurance, she won’t let people know that this has happened, Terry O’Neill.
TERRY O’NEILL: Well, sure. She won’t let people know that it has happened. It’s also the case that women who are in abusive relationships need to think carefully about what their options are, where can they go. There are communities where even if there is a shelter, that shelter is full for six months. You can’t get in for six months. So she needs to find &mdash; she needs to gather together the money, to move out, to find the apartment. It has to be in a neighborhood that has good schools for her kids and good services for her kids. She needs to be able to find a safe space. She needs to be able to get to a place where he can’t find her.
She needs to be able to go through the legal process to get the restraining order and the permission, in many states. Women who are being battered are not permitted to move to a safer place if it requires her to cross a state line, because he has a legal right to have access to the children. So if she lives, for instance, in Louisiana, as a case I’m familiar with, and a woman who had been battered and had lost her job in Louisiana, her parents in Arkansas said, “Come move in with us, and you can find a job there.” Oh, no, she wasn’t &mdash; that was not an option for her. She couldn’t cross state lines because of Louisiana law.
So there are all kinds of constraints on women&#8217;s ability to leave that relationship. And then you have Utah coming in and criminalizing her behavior.
How about if we take a step back and look at it from a different perspective and say, “Let&#8217;s provide services for women trying to escape violence, let&#8217;s provide realistic consequences to men who are violent toward women” &mdash; we don’t have nearly the kind of consequences that we need for men who are violent &mdash; ”and let&#8217;s begin changing the behavior of the men instead of trying to control the sexuality of the women”?
The man, the Utah legislator, as I understand it, who put this law in, he was asked, “Isn&#8217;t this really, you know, an anti-abortion measure?” And he said, “Listen, I am totally anti-abortion rights. I don’t want women to have any abortion rights, and I hope that this measure does restrict women&#8217;s ability to terminate a pregnancy when they want to.” He said, “I think the” &mdash; the Utah &mdash; he obviously is one who believes that the Utah legislature has more right to control a woman’s body than the woman herself does.
AMY GOODMAN : We’re going to continue this discussion, but we have to break for a minute. We&#8217;re talking with Terry O&#8217;Neill, president of the National Organization for Women &mdash; she’s in Washington, DC &mdash; and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, here in New York. We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Our guests today, Terry O&#8217;Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
Lynn, I’d like you to talk more about the Utah case. Again, summarize what it says. And then, it is not alone in this country, Utah, in passing laws that have this kind of effect on pregnant women, or considering laws, and I’d like you to go through them.
LYNN PALTROW : OK. Well, the Utah law was ostensibly passed in response to a particular event. And that’s often how anti-choice and fetal rights legislation gets passed, under the guise of “We&#8217;re just doing this little thing.” And this little thing is &mdash; involved a seventeen-year-old girl who was pregnant, whose boyfriend told her he would leave her if she continued to term. And in some act of absolute desperation, she apparently hired somebody to beat her up to cause her to lose the pregnancy. She survived. The baby survived. They arrested both the young man who beat her up and the young woman. The young man was charged with attempted feticide, and so was she. But when they realized that they really couldn’t apply the attempted feticide law to the girl herself, so outraged were they that they couldn’t lock up a seventeen-year-old for fifteen or more years, that they passed a law that purports to outlaw self-abortions.
First of all, you know, for people who claim to pass laws to promote a culture of life, it’s hard to imagine that, when they don’t value the life of also the life of this young woman. Anybody who is so desperate as to invite violence against herself &mdash; and she could have died from the beating &mdash; to think that a statute making that behavior a crime is going to deter such desperate behavior is pretty crazy, to begin with, and lacking in any common sense about &mdash; if you really want to value fetal life and maternal life, this is certainly not the way to do it.
One of the things the law reveals is that for many, many years, those groups who have been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade , the Supreme Court decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, have argued that if Roe is overturned, don’t worry, only the doctors are going to go to jail, not the women who, in seeking to control their reproductive lives, have abortions. Well, Utah has just lifted the veil on that, making very clear that women themselves will go to jail and for at least fifteen years, and life, in some circumstances.
But even beyond that, the law is written so broadly that it applies to any behavior a woman engages in knowingly, recklessly. And, you know, who gets to decide if what you&#8217;re doing is reckless is the arresting officer and the local prosecutor &mdash; not you, your heart, your minister; those people &mdash; and put you in jail. So a woman who is unable to leave a batterer could be charged.
Women who &mdash; in Iowa, they don’t even have a law like this on the books, but a young woman, after having a terrible argument with her &mdash; a husband from whom she was separated, got off the phone and went to go downstairs to see her children and fell down the stairs. She went to the hospital out of concern about her baby, got there, was really upset, hysterical, worried. And they started questioning her. And what they decided was her fall down the stairs was attempted feticide. And they arrested her and kept her in jail for several days, until the Iowa county attorney decided that their unprecedented and, frankly, illegal interpretation of the law couldn’t be applied to her, but only because she was in her second trimester and not her third trimester.
So I think people &mdash; when we give examples of women being arrested for staying with a batterer, people think these are slippery slope craziness. But we keep seeing cases like this. In fact, Utah, in 2004, arrested a woman who had given birth to twins, one of whom was stillborn, and they charged her with murder, because she had refused C-section two weeks earlier. And the theory was her refusal of the Caesarian section, Caesarian surgery, constituted murder. So right now there&#8217;s a law that’s been passed by both houses in Utah that would make miscarriages and stillbirths, because it applies to pregnant women from the moment they conceive.
One really interesting thing that people need to think about is that it is &mdash; people know that if a woman gives birth and then breastfeeds, it’s likely to continue the time where she won’t become pregnant again, while she’s breastfeeding. And apparently, one theory about why that works is that the hormones, that it &mdash; breastfeeding affects the body so that the fertilized egg can’t implant. That’s an abortion. That’s self-abortion. So if the state wants to set up a mechanism for policing pregnant women, Utah has done a very good job.
AMY GOODMAN : Louisiana?
LYNN PALTROW : Well, not Louisiana, but Mississippi. We look across the states. We see that our government is in deadlock about passing health insurance for people &mdash; healthcare reform for millions of people who need it. But state legislators are hard at work making it harder for pregnant women to access the healthcare they need and more likely for them and their healthcare providers to go to jail.
In Mississippi, there was a bill proposed to criminalize certain kinds of midwifery. The problem with that is, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina and after we saw in Haiti, that if your hospitals shut down, you need people who know how to deliver babies without electronic fetal monitors and surgical theaters and even epidurals. So you really don’t want to be making it a crime for certain kind of midwives to practice. But if a woman in a disaster area can’t access birth services, she also probably can’t access abortion services. And we know if she took measures into her own hands in Utah, she could go to jail for life.
In Nebraska, legislators, in the name of protecting the unborn from pain, argue that fetuses, after twenty weeks, experience pain. And their response to that is to outlaw all second trimester &mdash; to ban all second &mdash; third trimester abortions and to put the doctors who perform them in jail, even though, to the women who need them, they are heroes. We look at that, and we think, really? If you’re trying &mdash; if you believe that twenty-week fetuses experience pain to that extent, wouldn’t they also experience pain from electronic fetal monitors put through their scalps, from forceps deliveries, from pitocin-induced labor? And if your response to fetal pain is to outlaw something, then you’re going to also have to outlaw certain kinds of vaginal birth.
AMY GOODMAN : One of the participants in the Blair House Obama healthcare summit was Oklahoma Senator Coburn. His views on abortion?
LYNN PALTROW : Well, he has said that he believes that doctors who perform abortions should receive the death penalty. And in his state, women who experience stillbirths that have &mdash; the state claims was caused by something they did have been charged, in fact, with murder. In every state but South Carolina, and potentially Utah, those prosecutions lack any legal support. And if the woman is lucky enough to be adequately represented, eventually, perhaps years after she’s been in prison, she can get those charges dropped. But South Carolina, as a result of judicial activism, and now Utah, is making it possible to put women behind bars because they are either trying to go to term or because they take desperate measures not to.
AMY GOODMAN : Tom Coburn is a doctor.
LYNN PALTROW : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : And was sued by a woman who charged that he sterilized her without her knowing it, that he had gone in to save her life, really &mdash; I think she had an ectopic pregnancy in a fallopian tube, and he removed that, but he removed the good tube, as well.
LYNN PALTROW : Interesting.
AMY GOODMAN : The case ultimately dismissed because she didn’t show up in court.
LYNN PALTROW : Well, we know more and more as Catholic hospitals become the only hospital in town. There are more and more reports of women who go to those hospitals with ectopic pregnancies. Those are pregnancies in fallopian tubes. The embryo can never survive. It’s not a question of an abortion; it’s a question of saving the woman’s life. And recently we got a call from a woman where she was in agonizing pain. The fallopian tube could explode, putting her life at risk. And the Catholic hospital said, “There’s still a heartbeat. Go home and wait.” And so, they force women to suffer unbelievable pain or to travel hundreds of miles to a hospital that will treat them as human beings, not as subjects of religious orthodoxy.
AMY GOODMAN : Is anti-choice legislation on the rise? Have things changed during the Obama years? Or I should say “year.”
LYNN PALTROW : Well, there’s no question. And this was, unfortunately, well predicted, that violence has reemerged &mdash; the murder of Dr. Tiller, bombings of clinics &mdash; that when the anti-choice movement feels less in power, they increase their violence.
It’s hard to say if there’s more legislation. Every year, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of legislation in the state legislatures are proposed to regulate abortion. And I want to point out that what that means is that all of the other issues of concern about women&#8217;s health &mdash; breast cancer, heart disease, the rising rate of unnecessary C-sections &mdash; none of that gets addressed, because our state legislators will only focus on women&#8217;s issues if they are about restricting, in a greater way, access to abortion.
What I think may have changed is a rise in a more openness about what they&#8217;re really trying to do. And what they’re really trying to do is, in the guise of barring harm to unborn children, and sometimes they claim harm to pregnant women, what they&#8217;re really doing, as in Utah, is trying to put pregnant women behind bars.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Terry O&#8217;Neill, as you listen to this discussion on what pregnant women face around the country, the overall issue of how the state deals with women dealing with violence. You talked about training police, sheriffs, around domestic violence. Your final comment?
TERRY O’NEILL: Well, yeah, I think we need far more resources put into programs that end violence against women.
And let me just say one thing that Lynn Paltrow said. You were asking about laws around the country and anti-abortion laws. Even in the United States Congress, in the current health reform laws, we have seen both the House of Representatives and the Senate insert language into the health reform bill that would eventually, to a near certainty, eliminate private insurance coverage for abortion care, as well as public. The Senate bill takes a little longer to fully eliminate all private insurance coverage of abortion care. The House bill does it a lot more quickly. But both have the same ultimate result. So it’s not just in the states; it’s in the United States Congress, as well.
In terms of ending violence against women and ensuring that women have control of their own bodies, I think one of the things we really need to look at is who’s in charge here. We have 17 percent of the United States Congress is women. That’s not critical mass. It certainly isn’t half. And women do account for a little over half of the population of the United States. Five of the United States Supreme Court justices need to be women &mdash; period, end of discussion &mdash; at minimum, four. Currently, only two of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are women. And I think that women, if we are going to have equal rights, and if we are going to be respected equally as human beings on the same basis as men, we&#8217;ve got to get into positions of elected officials, and we’ve got to become the judges of this country, because right now, with male-dominated legislatures and male-dominated and often right-wing-dominated federal courts, we are really seriously being pushed backwards in our rights and our access to justice.
AMY GOODMAN : Terry O&#8217;Neill, I want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the National Organization for Women. And thanks, too, to Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Your website?
LYNN PALTROW : Www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org .
AMY GOODMAN : And thank you for joining us in Women’s History Month, as well, two women who are making history.AMYGOODMAN: I’m looking at a report from ABC News, how they describe the latest “controversial abortion bill in Utah meant to prevent planned assaults on unborn children may have opened a loophole that could allow women to be charged with murder if their reckless behavior causes miscarriages.” And on that issue, I wanted to bring in a second guest. Lynn Paltrow is the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

This is an astounding bill and actually also relates to the issue of domestic violence. Can you explain?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, the way the statute is written, any action a woman undertakes, knowingly or recklessly, can result in a charge of homicide with a penalty of fifteen years. So a woman who is pregnant and stays with her batterer is arguably being reckless in staying there. And should she stay there, she could literally be charged with attempted feticide or murder, if there is a — if she survives and the fetus doesn’t. And I think your other guest can talk about why women do stay in those circumstances and why making them criminals for doing so is so unjust.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s really astounding when you play this out, because if a woman is afraid that she might not get health insurance, she won’t let people know that this has happened, Terry O’Neill.

TERRY O’NEILL: Well, sure. She won’t let people know that it has happened. It’s also the case that women who are in abusive relationships need to think carefully about what their options are, where can they go. There are communities where even if there is a shelter, that shelter is full for six months. You can’t get in for six months. So she needs to find — she needs to gather together the money, to move out, to find the apartment. It has to be in a neighborhood that has good schools for her kids and good services for her kids. She needs to be able to find a safe space. She needs to be able to get to a place where he can’t find her.

She needs to be able to go through the legal process to get the restraining order and the permission, in many states. Women who are being battered are not permitted to move to a safer place if it requires her to cross a state line, because he has a legal right to have access to the children. So if she lives, for instance, in Louisiana, as a case I’m familiar with, and a woman who had been battered and had lost her job in Louisiana, her parents in Arkansas said, “Come move in with us, and you can find a job there.” Oh, no, she wasn’t — that was not an option for her. She couldn’t cross state lines because of Louisiana law.

So there are all kinds of constraints on women’s ability to leave that relationship. And then you have Utah coming in and criminalizing her behavior.

How about if we take a step back and look at it from a different perspective and say, “Let’s provide services for women trying to escape violence, let’s provide realistic consequences to men who are violent toward women” — we don’t have nearly the kind of consequences that we need for men who are violent — ”and let’s begin changing the behavior of the men instead of trying to control the sexuality of the women”?

The man, the Utah legislator, as I understand it, who put this law in, he was asked, “Isn’t this really, you know, an anti-abortion measure?” And he said, “Listen, I am totally anti-abortion rights. I don’t want women to have any abortion rights, and I hope that this measure does restrict women’s ability to terminate a pregnancy when they want to.” He said, “I think the” — the Utah — he obviously is one who believes that the Utah legislature has more right to control a woman’s body than the woman herself does.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion, but we have to break for a minute. We’re talking with Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women — she’s in Washington, DC — and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, here in New York. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Our guests today, Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, and Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Lynn, I’d like you to talk more about the Utah case. Again, summarize what it says. And then, it is not alone in this country, Utah, in passing laws that have this kind of effect on pregnant women, or considering laws, and I’d like you to go through them.

LYNNPALTROW: OK. Well, the Utah law was ostensibly passed in response to a particular event. And that’s often how anti-choice and fetal rights legislation gets passed, under the guise of “We’re just doing this little thing.” And this little thing is — involved a seventeen-year-old girl who was pregnant, whose boyfriend told her he would leave her if she continued to term. And in some act of absolute desperation, she apparently hired somebody to beat her up to cause her to lose the pregnancy. She survived. The baby survived. They arrested both the young man who beat her up and the young woman. The young man was charged with attempted feticide, and so was she. But when they realized that they really couldn’t apply the attempted feticide law to the girl herself, so outraged were they that they couldn’t lock up a seventeen-year-old for fifteen or more years, that they passed a law that purports to outlaw self-abortions.

First of all, you know, for people who claim to pass laws to promote a culture of life, it’s hard to imagine that, when they don’t value the life of also the life of this young woman. Anybody who is so desperate as to invite violence against herself — and she could have died from the beating — to think that a statute making that behavior a crime is going to deter such desperate behavior is pretty crazy, to begin with, and lacking in any common sense about — if you really want to value fetal life and maternal life, this is certainly not the way to do it.

One of the things the law reveals is that for many, many years, those groups who have been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, have argued that if Roe is overturned, don’t worry, only the doctors are going to go to jail, not the women who, in seeking to control their reproductive lives, have abortions. Well, Utah has just lifted the veil on that, making very clear that women themselves will go to jail and for at least fifteen years, and life, in some circumstances.

But even beyond that, the law is written so broadly that it applies to any behavior a woman engages in knowingly, recklessly. And, you know, who gets to decide if what you’re doing is reckless is the arresting officer and the local prosecutor — not you, your heart, your minister; those people — and put you in jail. So a woman who is unable to leave a batterer could be charged.

Women who — in Iowa, they don’t even have a law like this on the books, but a young woman, after having a terrible argument with her — a husband from whom she was separated, got off the phone and went to go downstairs to see her children and fell down the stairs. She went to the hospital out of concern about her baby, got there, was really upset, hysterical, worried. And they started questioning her. And what they decided was her fall down the stairs was attempted feticide. And they arrested her and kept her in jail for several days, until the Iowa county attorney decided that their unprecedented and, frankly, illegal interpretation of the law couldn’t be applied to her, but only because she was in her second trimester and not her third trimester.

So I think people — when we give examples of women being arrested for staying with a batterer, people think these are slippery slope craziness. But we keep seeing cases like this. In fact, Utah, in 2004, arrested a woman who had given birth to twins, one of whom was stillborn, and they charged her with murder, because she had refused C-section two weeks earlier. And the theory was her refusal of the Caesarian section, Caesarian surgery, constituted murder. So right now there’s a law that’s been passed by both houses in Utah that would make miscarriages and stillbirths, because it applies to pregnant women from the moment they conceive.

One really interesting thing that people need to think about is that it is — people know that if a woman gives birth and then breastfeeds, it’s likely to continue the time where she won’t become pregnant again, while she’s breastfeeding. And apparently, one theory about why that works is that the hormones, that it — breastfeeding affects the body so that the fertilized egg can’t implant. That’s an abortion. That’s self-abortion. So if the state wants to set up a mechanism for policing pregnant women, Utah has done a very good job.

AMYGOODMAN: Louisiana?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, not Louisiana, but Mississippi. We look across the states. We see that our government is in deadlock about passing health insurance for people — healthcare reform for millions of people who need it. But state legislators are hard at work making it harder for pregnant women to access the healthcare they need and more likely for them and their healthcare providers to go to jail.

In Mississippi, there was a bill proposed to criminalize certain kinds of midwifery. The problem with that is, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina and after we saw in Haiti, that if your hospitals shut down, you need people who know how to deliver babies without electronic fetal monitors and surgical theaters and even epidurals. So you really don’t want to be making it a crime for certain kind of midwives to practice. But if a woman in a disaster area can’t access birth services, she also probably can’t access abortion services. And we know if she took measures into her own hands in Utah, she could go to jail for life.

In Nebraska, legislators, in the name of protecting the unborn from pain, argue that fetuses, after twenty weeks, experience pain. And their response to that is to outlaw all second trimester — to ban all second — third trimester abortions and to put the doctors who perform them in jail, even though, to the women who need them, they are heroes. We look at that, and we think, really? If you’re trying — if you believe that twenty-week fetuses experience pain to that extent, wouldn’t they also experience pain from electronic fetal monitors put through their scalps, from forceps deliveries, from pitocin-induced labor? And if your response to fetal pain is to outlaw something, then you’re going to also have to outlaw certain kinds of vaginal birth.

AMYGOODMAN: One of the participants in the Blair House Obama healthcare summit was Oklahoma Senator Coburn. His views on abortion?

LYNNPALTROW: Well, he has said that he believes that doctors who perform abortions should receive the death penalty. And in his state, women who experience stillbirths that have — the state claims was caused by something they did have been charged, in fact, with murder. In every state but South Carolina, and potentially Utah, those prosecutions lack any legal support. And if the woman is lucky enough to be adequately represented, eventually, perhaps years after she’s been in prison, she can get those charges dropped. But South Carolina, as a result of judicial activism, and now Utah, is making it possible to put women behind bars because they are either trying to go to term or because they take desperate measures not to.

AMYGOODMAN: Tom Coburn is a doctor.

LYNNPALTROW: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: And was sued by a woman who charged that he sterilized her without her knowing it, that he had gone in to save her life, really — I think she had an ectopic pregnancy in a fallopian tube, and he removed that, but he removed the good tube, as well.

LYNNPALTROW: Interesting.

AMYGOODMAN: The case ultimately dismissed because she didn’t show up in court.

LYNNPALTROW: Well, we know more and more as Catholic hospitals become the only hospital in town. There are more and more reports of women who go to those hospitals with ectopic pregnancies. Those are pregnancies in fallopian tubes. The embryo can never survive. It’s not a question of an abortion; it’s a question of saving the woman’s life. And recently we got a call from a woman where she was in agonizing pain. The fallopian tube could explode, putting her life at risk. And the Catholic hospital said, “There’s still a heartbeat. Go home and wait.” And so, they force women to suffer unbelievable pain or to travel hundreds of miles to a hospital that will treat them as human beings, not as subjects of religious orthodoxy.

AMYGOODMAN: Is anti-choice legislation on the rise? Have things changed during the Obama years? Or I should say “year.”

LYNNPALTROW: Well, there’s no question. And this was, unfortunately, well predicted, that violence has reemerged — the murder of Dr. Tiller, bombings of clinics — that when the anti-choice movement feels less in power, they increase their violence.

It’s hard to say if there’s more legislation. Every year, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of legislation in the state legislatures are proposed to regulate abortion. And I want to point out that what that means is that all of the other issues of concern about women’s health — breast cancer, heart disease, the rising rate of unnecessary C-sections — none of that gets addressed, because our state legislators will only focus on women’s issues if they are about restricting, in a greater way, access to abortion.

What I think may have changed is a rise in a more openness about what they’re really trying to do. And what they’re really trying to do is, in the guise of barring harm to unborn children, and sometimes they claim harm to pregnant women, what they’re really doing, as in Utah, is trying to put pregnant women behind bars.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Terry O’Neill, as you listen to this discussion on what pregnant women face around the country, the overall issue of how the state deals with women dealing with violence. You talked about training police, sheriffs, around domestic violence. Your final comment?

TERRY O’NEILL: Well, yeah, I think we need far more resources put into programs that end violence against women.

And let me just say one thing that Lynn Paltrow said. You were asking about laws around the country and anti-abortion laws. Even in the United States Congress, in the current health reform laws, we have seen both the House of Representatives and the Senate insert language into the health reform bill that would eventually, to a near certainty, eliminate private insurance coverage for abortion care, as well as public. The Senate bill takes a little longer to fully eliminate all private insurance coverage of abortion care. The House bill does it a lot more quickly. But both have the same ultimate result. So it’s not just in the states; it’s in the United States Congress, as well.

In terms of ending violence against women and ensuring that women have control of their own bodies, I think one of the things we really need to look at is who’s in charge here. We have 17 percent of the United States Congress is women. That’s not critical mass. It certainly isn’t half. And women do account for a little over half of the population of the United States. Five of the United States Supreme Court justices need to be women — period, end of discussion — at minimum, four. Currently, only two of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are women. And I think that women, if we are going to have equal rights, and if we are going to be respected equally as human beings on the same basis as men, we’ve got to get into positions of elected officials, and we’ve got to become the judges of this country, because right now, with male-dominated legislatures and male-dominated and often right-wing-dominated federal courts, we are really seriously being pushed backwards in our rights and our access to justice.

AMYGOODMAN: Terry O’Neill, I want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the National Organization for Women. And thanks, too, to Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Your website?